
In January 2021, a short squeeze of the stock of the American video game retailer GameStop
GameStop
GameStop Corp. is an American video game, consumer electronics and gaming merchandise retailer. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, United States, a suburb of Dallas, and operates 5,830 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealan…
Full Answer
Should you Buy GameStop stock?
What Happened With GameStop Stock? July 26, 2021 by Justin Weinger Leave a Comment — In 2021, GameStop, a company known for selling video games and accessories, suddenly achieved a rapid increase...
How to Buy GameStop stock?
Feb 08, 2022 · GameStop Stock Now. What happened with GameStop Stock?? The stock has erased most of its gains from the short squeeze and is currently trading at just above $100 per share. Ask any fundamental analyst out there and they’ll tell you how overpriced GameStop still is. After all, before any short squeeze occurred, the stock was trading for below $5.
What happened with GameStop stock?
Jan 29, 2022 · Since January 2021, GameStop's stock price has seesawed. As of the close bell Friday, the share price was at $98.50, which is still more than what financial analysts say the company is worth. "The...
Is GameStop stock a buy?
Feb 17, 2022 · GameStop stock entered 2021 on a strong note after almost tripling in 2020 amid optimism over its restructuring and the pivot towards e-commerce. However, Wall Street funds weren't too convinced...

Why has GameStop stock fallen?
This Analyst Says 'Hold. ' GameStop reported fiscal third-quarter results that either showed continued struggles or signs of a much bigger transformation, with an acknowledgment by management that the retailer is branching out into areas like nonfungible tokens and blockchain.Dec 9, 2021
What happened to GameStop stock in 2021?
Stocks of video game retailer GameStop exploded in January 2021, effectively doubling in value on a daily basis. At the close of trading on January 27, GameStop Corporation's stock price reaching 347.51 U.S. dollars per share - or +134 percent compared to the day before.Jan 31, 2022
Who shorted GameStop?
Mohammad Hormozzadeh, a 31-year-old day trader in Brooklyn, N.Y., was one of those investors who directly registered shares. He expects the big short squeeze to hit GameStop later this year.Feb 5, 2022
Did GameStop short squeeze happen?
The trading frenzy in GameStop stock and the massive short squeeze that occurred in January 2021 dealt a 49% capital loss to the hedge fund in the first quarter of last year.Feb 12, 2022
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 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 ...
How much does George Sherman own?
GameStop CEO George Sherman owns over 2.3 million shares in the company, according to Bloomberg News. These shares were worth $44 million on December 31, but reached $1.1 billion when GameStop's stock reached $469, briefly making him a billionaire, before the value of his stock dropped to $901 million on January 29.
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".
What is gamma squeeze?
According to the Financial Times, a "gamma squeeze" also took place in addition to the short squeeze: as traders bet on the rise of stocks by purchasing call options, options sellers hedge their positions by purchasing the underlying stocks (here, GameStop and the related securities), thereby driving their prices even higher.
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.
How much did GameStop short sellers lose in 2021?
That accelerated the momentum even more, creating a feedback loop. As of Tuesday, short sellers of GameStop were already down more than $5 billion in 2021, according to S3 Partners.
Is GameStop stock going down?
The company has been losing money for years as sales of video games increasingly go online, and its stock fell for six straight years before rebounding in 2020. That pushed many professional investors to make bets that GameStop’s stock will decline even further.
Is Melvin Capital exiting GameStop?
Melvin Capital is also exiting GameStop, with manager Gabe Plotkin telling CNBC that the hedge fund was taking a significant loss. He denied rumors that the hedge fund will fail. The size of the losses taken by Citron and Melvin are unknown.
Is GameStop a place to buy a game?
Across most of America, GameStop is just a place to buy a video game. On Wall Street, though, it’s become a battleground where swarms of smaller investors see themselves making an epic stand against the 1%. The funds serving the financial elite are starting to walk away in defeat.
How to get rich or lol trying
Say you’re a hedge fund that has determined, through expert analysis, that the future of video-game retail is even bleaker than its present.
Is this time different?
Manias have been around for as long as financial markets have. And retail investors have been hyping stocks in chat rooms — then making their collective presence felt in markets — since the dot-com boom.
Is this the French Revolution of finance?
Former White House press secretary Anthony Scaramucci thinks so. And there is certainly a populist verve to Redditors getting rich at the expense of large investors, while making a mockery of the notion that private financial markets rationally allocate capital.
What is short selling on GameStop?
Like many companies that are in rough shape, GameStop was the subject of what's called short selling, in which professional investors borrow shares of stock to sell and then buy back later so they can return them, which lets them pocket the profit if the stock price goes down. They're basically bets that the company will fail.
What is a gametop?
What is GameStop? GameStop is a video game retailer. Like most stores that still sell products in person, it has had a hard time lately as video game sales have moved online and as the Covid-19 pandemic keeps people away from stores. It's still in business, but few people expect it to grow again.
Is short selling a stock a risk?
Because short sellers — frequently hedge funds — in essence are betting against a company's success, it can be a risky position. Any positive news or enthusiasm for the stock will push up the stock's valuation, minimizing profit for the short seller.
What does a short seller do?
Short sellers do the opposite — they borrow and sell a stock when it's high and bet that it will continue to fall. If that doesn't happen and the stock price rises, short sellers are forced to cover their positions or buy more stocks — to minimize their losses.
Does BlackRock have mutual funds?
BlackRock, which operates mutual funds, may have made billions of dollars from the rise in GameStop shares alone. But the bigger and longer-lasting impact may be on how the market itself operates. Never before has a group of amateur investors taken on a hedge fund like this and won.
What is WSB in Reddit?
The internet has been used to prognosticate about stocks for decades, but there's never been anything quite like the Reddit community called r/wallstreetbets, also known as WSB. WSB takes something of an internet extremist's approach to investing.
Is GameStop publicly traded?
They're basically bets that the company will fail. GameStop was one of the most shorted of all publicly traded companies. Other companies on the list include AMC Theatres, Bed Bath & Beyond and even the mostly defunct Blockbuster. Remember those names. And then GameStop became the source of a short squeeze.
What is a GameStop?
GameStop is an American brick-and-mortar retailer that specialises in video games, consumer electronics and gaming merchandise. It was widely deemed a company in declining health—indeed, its mere existence as a physical shop was viewed on Wall Street as being decidedly outdated, and its business model was hurtling towards failure.
When will GameStop be released in 2021?
by internationalbanker March 29, 2021. March 29, 2021. By Alexander Jones, International Banker. Unless you’ve been completely cut off from the outside world, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the word GameStop circulating around social media and in news headlines over the last couple of months. And along with GameStop, it’s also likely ...
What happens when you buy an ETF?
When buying into an ETF, an investor effectively gains exposure to all of the company constituents of that ETF, irrespective of their individual prices. And when selling, the investor similarly sells all the constituents at the same time.

Overview
Background
Short sellingis a finance practice in which an investor, known as the short-seller, borrows shares and immediately sells them, hoping to buy them back later ("covering") at a lower price, return the borrowed shares (plus interest) to the lender and profit off the difference. The practice carries an unlimited risk of losses, because there is no inherent limit to how high a stock's price can rise. …
Timeline
In January 2021, Reddit users on the r/wallstreetbets subreddit built the foundations for a short squeeze on GameStop, pushing up the stock price significantly. This occurred shortly after a comment from Citron Research predicting the value of the stock would decrease. The stock price increased 1,500 percent by January 27 over the course of two weeks, and its high volatility caused trading to be halted multiple times. According to Dow Jonesmarket data, more than 175 million s…
Impact on involved entities
Short sellers who had bet against GameStop suffered large losses as a result of the short squeeze.
By January 28, 2021, Melvin Capital, an investment fund that heavily shorted GameStop, had lost 30 percent of its value since the start of 2021, and by the end of January had suffered a loss of 53 percent of its investments. Citadel LLC and firm partners then invested $2 billion into Melvin, while Point72 …
Other affected assets
Apart from GameStop, many other heavily shorted securities (as well as securities with low short interest) saw increases in their prices:
Prices may be higher during extended-hours trading.
The shares of GME Resources, an Australian mining company with Australian Securities Exchange(ASX) symbol GME, increased more than 50 percent during intraday trading, closing with a 13.3-…
Aftermath
On January 27, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration were monitoring the situation. Yellen convened a meeting of financial regulators, including the heads of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, t…
Reactions
A variety of politicians and commentators across the political spectrum made statements in support of those driving up the price of GameStop and other stocks, as well as against Robinhood and other companies' decision to limit these trades, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Ted Cruz, Representatives Ro Khanna, Ted Lieu, and Rashida Tlaib, Fox Business host Charles …
See also
• Cryptocurrency bubble – Speculative bubble regarding cryptocurrency prices
• Everything bubble
• Philip Falcone – businessman who performed a short squeeze in 2012
• Greater fool theory – Theory that the price of an object is determined by consumer demand