I swear I'm a market retard. I've never been able to grasp the concept of buying/selling something that doesn't actually exist.

It's like mineral rights in Texas. You can buy a piece of surface land but the minerals underneath still be retained by the seller. That's like buying a bottle of water and Ozarka retaining the rights to the water. It's just dumb.

This is a good explanation for market retards:

Stock Market for Dummies: Gamestop’s Fantastic Success Explained

Short Selling, aka Pigeons vs Skunks

Normally investors follow a simple rule – buy low, sell high. However, some use a risky method called short selling, when an individual profits from the fall of the price. In short, it looks likes this. A pigeon has five seeds. A skunk asks for a short-term loan and then immediately sells the seeds, hoping that their price will fall before he has to cough them up. If the seed price falls, he then buys them at a lower price and returns them to the pigeon, thus profiting on the difference.

Essentially short sellers bet that companies will fare poorly in the immediate future.

https://sputniknews.com/business/202101281081902217-stock-market-for-dummies-gamestops-fantastic-success-explained/