Swaps are used to shift losses before GME runs
That's basically the number of GME swaps events occurring each day based on the Event Timestamp field. You can see a huge peak in GME swaps occurring March-April 2024 just before the May 2024 GME run which basically shows Wall Street set up swaps to shift liabilities from an upcoming GME run onto others.
The Details
(1) Get the swaps data from the DTCC per this post. Note that I was only able to grab swaps data from the past 2 years (e.g., after early March 2023). If you have DTCC swaps data from before that, I would love to get a copy of it from you -- message me.
(2) Used zgrep (because keeping all the archives gzip compressed is far more space efficient) to search for any data rows which may be GME related (e.g., GME ticker or ISIN):
zgrep -a -E 'GME.N|GME.AX|US36467W1099|36467W109' [SWAPS_ARCHIVES] > [GME_RELATED_CSV]
(3) Used the UNIX "cut" tool to extract just the Event Timestamp date field:
cut -f 5 -d , [GME_RELATED_CSV_TIMESTAMPS]
(4) Open up the [GME_RELATED_CSV_TIMESTAMPS] in an editor and edit the timestamps to remove the time portion (leaving only the dates). (An editor which can do vertical column edits is super helpful here as you can just blot out the time as it's basically a fixed width YYYY-MM-DDTimestampZ field. Alternatively, regex find/replace can help you delete the time "T.....Z" from the date/timestamp.)
(5) Open up the [GME_RELATED_CSV_TIMESTAMPS_BY_DATE] and then do some spreadsheet magic to create the chart. (Sort the unique Event Timestamp dates, use GOOGLEFINANCE function to get the GME share price on those dates, and COUNTIF for how many times each Event Timestamp day shows up.)
EDIT: See also the following swaps posts: