Posted on 03/31/2022 2:15:14 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Investors in GameStop are back on board a volatile roller coaster more than a year after the so-called "meme stock" phenomenon nabbed headlines in early 2021.
While GameStop's recent highs are not nearly as close to the surge last year (when its stock hovered around $400 a share at one point), experts have said the company's stock price far exceeds what the retailer is actually worth.
"It's hard to make this argument that the price is worth more than $80," said Kevin Mullally, an assistant professor of finance in the College of Business at the University of Central Florida.
On Wednesday, GameStop opened at $175. Since March 1, GameStop's stock has yo-yoed between $78 and $189. On Tuesday, shares dropped 5.1%, resulting in the New York Stock Exchange halting trading of the stock briefly.
These developments have many people wondering why GameStop's stock continues to perform beyond expectations.
The origin story
This illustration photo shows a person checking the GameStop stock on a smartphone on Feb. 17, 2021. GameStop is a brick-and-mortar retail shop founded in 1984 where customers buy, sell and trade video games and other gaming accessories.
"GameStop as a business, if we separate it from the stock itself, was a dying business in a sense," Mullally told NPR.
Hedge funds thought the same way in 2021.
"About a year ago, they saw the price of the stock at around $20 was overvalued," and started shorting the stock, Mullally said.
Shorting means investors are betting against the company and will profit if the value of the asset falls.
Last year, amateur day traders banded together to push the video game retailer's stock price higher. The traders, organized largely through internet communities on Reddit, sought to fuel a short squeeze on the video game retailer and trigger major losses for hedge funds.
Melvin Capital and Citron were two of the funds caught in the squeeze, forcing them to buy more GameStop stock to cover their losses, which ended up driving the stock price even higher.
Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of WallStreetBets, a Reddit forum, told All Things Considered last year that, "it's the democratization of financial markets" that is "giving a voice to the people that didn't previously have one."
Mullally didn't expect the fanfare over GameStop to last nearly as long as it has.
"My prediction was that this couldn't persist because eventually people were going to lose money. Eventually this would have to end," Mullally said. "So far I have been proven wrong."
That's largely due to the support of online communities.
"Anytime this dips under $100, people come back in and prop it up," he added.
What's going on now and why?
Part of this bump in price is likely thanks to GameStop chairman Ryan Cohen purchasing shares in the company, said Christopher Kardatzke, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Quiver Quantitative Inc., an alternative data company for retail investors.
Last week, Cohen purchased 100,000 shares of the video game retailer — bringing his ownership to 11.9%, CNBC reported. He purchased these shares through his investment company, RC Ventures
A move like this "is seen as an indicator of the insider sentiment of their own company. It's a valuable metric," Kardatzke told NPR. "This likely caused more people to have more confidence in investing in GameStop."
Traders closely monitoring GameStop have no doubt witnessed the volatility of the stock itself, he said.
"When you see price movement in a stock like GameStop it generates a lot of discussion and gets a lot of people interested in what it's going to do next," Kardatzke said.
Mullally noted that it likely all comes down to supply and demand.
The more interest GameStop stock generates, the more demand some traders seem to have for it, he said.
Mullally admits he remains baffled by the interest in a stock that he views as not especially valuable.
"GameStop as a company is not doing anything productive," he said. "But it's like people buying pet rocks or Beanie Babies. Those things are fundamentally worthless. It's strange and I don't understand it. But there are a lot of strange things that people buy and I don't understand."
People made big money on tulips. Just not the ones who ended up with them when the music stopped.
Amazing. All kinds of fraud and chicanery are allowed in the stock market in all of the big tech categories. Twitter is probably 50% fraudulent bot accounts. Likewise for Facebook that lied across the board about user numbers. Not a peep. But anything from “day traders” endangering hedge fund machinations and trade gets immediately halted.
Ba$tards all...
Article omits the fact that the hedge funds shorted more stock than actually existed in an attempt to use the weight of their fund to drive the stock to artificial lows. Had they done it to a less visible company (at least to the Reddit community) it likely would have worked.
Good comment.
Better comment
I wonder if some of the interest in GameStop is due to people wanting to own physical copies of games and other entertainment, rather than trust availability through the cloud, under terms that can change without notice.
rolling the dice on gamestock is probably as satisfying as rolling the dice on one of the bazillion “crypto-currencies” ...
On a related note:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/14/22976557/cd-sales-increase-2021-recording-industry-association-of-america
Yes, CD sales have a long way to go to get anywhere near their peak but I think the Kanadian government shutting down protesters' accounts has broken any trust people have in government or korporations.
“But anything from “day traders” endangering hedge fund machinations and trade gets immediately halted.”
The kiddies trading GME dont know how to trade. Probably most of them just place market orders that run through all the sitting orders, creating order book imbalances that the market makers step back from, hence the trading halts.
I do only casual gaming. I don't have much time for it. But I have noticed an uptick in young people who want physical books and movies.
Yeah you can "watch it on streaming" but that is only if it is available. And they can change it at their whim. Or block it for some reason just when you want to watch it.
With games there seems to a certain amount of "the latest update ruined it" and they want to go back to the original. Can't do that with a downloaded copy. But you can if you have the original disk.
100% THIS!!!!!!!
These kiddies have done their due diligence. They have exposed the shenanigans of the hedge funds and market makers. They have stuck by a company that actually has a good chance to transform themselves from brick and mortar to a modern internet sales business model. They believe that Ryan Cohen can due for GameStop what he did for Chewy. Think about who would have thought you could start up an internet pet supply company when a half dozen brick and mortar stores have online presence and Amazon sells the same stuff? But Ryan Cohen found a way and was richly rewarded for it.
The "kiddies" as you term them value the company as they would a start up. They believe that Ryan Cohen will successfully navigate the current crypto-technology space and put together a market place for games and other products that will become the dominant NFT marketplace.
So the "kiddies" have a compelling business model to invest in. They also have the fact that hedge funds tried to "cellar box" GME. This led to the realization that the hedge funds have been naked shorting this stock. They have discovered evidence that shows the current short interest is not a real indicator of how much a company is shorted. The hedge funds have been able to hide the naked shorts on the dark pools.
Finally, I have invested in GME. I'm far from being a "kiddie". I have DRS some of those shares as well. This is not investment advice, I just happen to like the stock.
One of these "kiddies" has curated a library of 232 Due Diligence type articles put together by the people that frequent the reddit subgroups. you can find it here: https://fliphtml5.com/bookcase/kosyg
The kiddies were used as useful idiot cannon fodder by a few large traders to pile in and short squeeze the stock. They walked away with huge profits where most of the kiddies lost money.
P.S. Never confuse knowing how to research a compnay with knowing his to trade the stock.
So Ryan Cohen buying 100k shares recently (as well as other insiders) was because he wanted to give his money away to the few large traders. You are buying into the propaganda coming from the corrupt business media.
I don't care if you don't like the stock nor the story for the future. But when you attack the investors in the stock who have uncovered huge corruption and collusion between brokers, market makers and consultant groups you become part of the problem.
There are a ton of things going on with dark pools that are costing all investors money. When stocks are sold through the dark pools it damages price discovery. The retail investor (that's all of us who aren't billionaires) gets screwed.
My point is some of the "kiddies" as you call them bought in to GME when the price was well below 40 per share. They haven't lost a dime. Some bought in last January in the 250-500 range. Many of the latter have dollar cost averaged when GameStop was low to bring down their cost basis price. Some lost all their money because they bought high and sold low, but if they really were "kiddies" their investment horizon is long enough that they will have plenty of time to make up for it.
As for me my GME investment is a small fraction of my entire portfolio. But I am not a kiddie and I have probably lost more at the horse track (over the last 5 years) trying to win a pick-6, than I have in GME.
Finally for all you "adult" investors if you have a better stock that has a decent growth story over the next 10 years AND has the potential for a short squeeze please share it. I can forego the horse track and spend a little money on one of your favorite picks.
“So Ryan Cohen buying 100k shares recently (as well as other insiders) was because he wanted to give his money away to the few large traders”
Obviously I was referring to the initial short squeeze play so why respond with that? It makes me think you dont know about thd stock’s history.
Silly me why would I think you were talking about a year ago when a recent article about GME is published?
Perhaps if you had stated you were specifically talking about the Jan 2021 "sneeze" I wouldn't have misunderstood
“Silly me why would I think you were talking about a year ago when a recent article about GME is published?”
Why, because you were resonding to my post, not the article, thats why.
“Perhaps if you had stated you were specifically talking about the Jan 2021 “sneeze” I wouldn’t have misunderstood”
Perhaps if you really knew the stock, you would not have been confused and would have known I could have only been referring to the 2021 squeeze.
Yep. What’s the difference in GameStop and Bitcoin?
GameStop actually has a couple of hard assets...
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