GameStop has been swept up in a battle between big-moneyed hedge funds betting against it and small investors trying to prop it up. That has caused GameStop’s share price to soar despite the shaky financials underneath.
Why did the price of GameStop stocks jump so suddenly?
Feb 05, 2021 · On January 13, the shares of the company GameStop began to inch higher. On the first day of vacation, the stock was $43 per share, and it reached a high of $483 per share just a couple of days later. This was around 1100% gain. Many began to wonder how this happened, especially considering that GameStop seems like an unlikely stock to be on the rise.
Why is GameStop stock going up?
Jan 25, 2021 · “The sudden, sharp surge in GameStop’s share price and valuation likely has been fueled by a short squeeze, given the high short interest, and, to a lesser degree, speculation by retail investors...
Why did GameStop stock rise?
Jan 28, 2021 · April 11, 2021 Recently you may have remembered about Gamestop being all over the news due to a huge rise in its stock. The stock went from 65$ per share all the way up to 347.5$ in under 5 days, it nearly went up by 600%. The cause of this was a short squeeze.
How high did GameStop go?
Approximately 140 percent of GameStop's public float had been sold short, and the rush to buy shares to cover those positions as the price rose caused it to rise even further. The short squeeze was initially and primarily triggered by users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets , an Internet forum on the social news website Reddit , although a number of hedge funds also participated.
How much did GameStop stock cost in 2020?
For the entire first half of 2020, its stock was trading for less than $10 a share, even as the pandemic led to a surge in the usage and popularity of video games. GameStop, in the early days of the pandemic, got a wave of bad press for declaring itself “essential,” and for one store reportedly ordering employees to return to work ...
Is GameStop a declining company?
For much of the last few years, GameStop has been seen as a declining brick-and-mortar retailer.
The squeeze
Due to the rampant rise in GME’s stock price, Citron Research and Melvin Capital had been taking on significant losses, and with due time, they would eventually have to close their position. Closing their position would squeeze them out of their position.
How does Reddit feel about this?
Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets have broken all-time traffic records this week as millions of visitors flocked to the subreddit. According to Mashable, r/WallStreetBets received approximately 74 million page views in the past 24 hours. Note, Reddit had 52 million daily active users in October 2020.
Can regulatory bodies do anything?
As the trading volatility ensues, regulators are becoming increasingly worried about all the signals this volatility is sending to traders, like TD Ameritrade and Schwab. Both brokerages have restricted certain kinds of trades in GameStop and AMC.
Why did GameStop stock fall?
GameStop, an American chain of brick-and-mortar video game stores, had struggled in recent years due to competition from digital distribution services, as well as the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which reduced the number of people who shopped in-person. As a result, GameStop's stock price declined, leading many institutional investors to short sell the stock. On January 22, 2021, approximately 140 percent of GameStop's public float had been sold short, meaning some shorted shares had been re-lent and shorted again. Analysts at Goldman Sachs later noted that short interest exceeding 100 percent of a company's public had only occurred 15 times in the prior 10 years.
How much stock did GameStop sell?
As of January 31, executives at BlackBerry and GameStop had sold more than $22 million in stock since January 1. There is no allegation of insider trading among BlackBerry executives, according to CBS News. Three BlackBerry executives sold nearly $1.7 million of the company's stock, with one of the executives, Chief Financial Officer Steve Rai, selling all of his shares in the company excepting unvested employee stock options.
What happened to GameStop stock in 2021?
In January 2021, a short squeeze of the stock of the American video game retailer GameStop ( NYSE : GME) and other securities took place , causing major financial consequences for certain hedge funds and large losses for short sellers. Approximately 140 percent of GameStop's public float had been sold short, and the rush to buy shares to cover those positions as the price rose caused it to rise even further. The short squeeze was initially and primarily triggered by users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, an Internet forum on the social news website Reddit, although a number of hedge funds also participated. At its height, on January 28, the short squeeze caused the retailer's stock price to reach a pre-market value of over US$ 500 per share, nearly 30 times the $17.25 valuation at the beginning of the month. The price of many other heavily shorted securities and cryptocurrencies also increased.
How much did Bitcoin increase in value?
In addition, the price of Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, increased 20 percent in value to more than $37,000 after Elon Musk endorsed it in his Twitter bio, partially related to the surge in the GameStop share price by Reddit users. Robinhood then began limiting the trading on Dogecoin.
What is the price of GameStop in 2021?
As of January 28, 2021. [update] , the all-time highest intraday stock price for GameStop was $483.00 (nearly 190 times the low of $2.57 reached 9 months earlier in April 2020). In pre-market trading hours the same day, it briefly hit over $500, up from $17.25 at the start of the month.
What happened to Robinhood?
A Robinhood customer filed a class-action lawsuit against the company on January 28 for halting trading on GameStop. The lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, claimed that Robinhood "purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock 'GME' from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise thereby deprived retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market"; the lawsuit also accused Robinhood of "manipulating the open-market". Several other investors began using the app DoNotPay to automatically join the lawsuit.
Who owns GameStop?
However, investor Michael Burry, who had acquired a 3.3-percent stake in GameStop in 2019, criticized the short squeeze, stating that "there should be legal and regulatory repercussions", and adding "this is unnatural, insane, and dangerous".