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posted by martyb on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the ups-and-downs dept.

The Complete Moron’s Guide to GameStop’s Stock Roller Coaster

The Complete Moron’s Guide to GameStop’s Stock Roller Coaster:

Last week, an epic short squeeze had driven GameStop stock up to $40 a share, a roughly 1,500 percent increase from its low point nine months ago. Little did anyone know at the time that this would only be the beginning of the story.

As I write this, GameStop's stock price is hovering around $350, up another 775 percent or so since I wrote about this situation eight days ago. By the time you read this, that number may be horribly outdated, as the stock continues to bounce up and down with extreme volatility hour by hour (it dipped down as low as $61 and peaked as high as $159 on Friday).

The current stock price now gives the company a market cap of about $26 billion.

On the surface, that means the market currently thinks GameStop is worth more than twice as much now (during a potentially existential threat to brick and mortar game sales) as it was during the height of the Wii boom in late 2007, when console game downloads were barely a thing.

Also at: Business Insider.

Melvin Capital, Hedge Fund Targeted by Reddit Board, Closes out of GameStop Short Position

Melvin Capital, hedge fund targeted by Reddit board, closes out of GameStop short position:

Melvin Capital closed out its short position in GameStop on Tuesday afternoon after taking a huge loss, the hedge fund's manager told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin.

GameStop, hedge funds' most-hated stock, was targeted by an army of retail investors who marshaled forces against short sellers in online chat rooms. In the Reddit forum "wallstreetbets" with more than 2 million subscribers, rookie investors encouraged each other to pile into GameStop's shares and call options, creating massive short squeezes in the stock.

CNBC could not confirm the amount of losses Melvin Capital took on the short position. Citadel and Point72 have infused close to $3 billion into Gabe Plotkin's hedge fund to shore up its finances. On Wednesday's "Squawk Box," Sorkin said Plotkin told him that speculation about a bankruptcy filing is false.

GameStop shares have soared more than 400% this week alone to $347.51 apiece, driving its January gains to 685%. The stock was worth just $6 four months ago.

Reddit's WallStreetBets is locked as AMC, GameStop stocks fall after-hours

For the past week, Reddit's WallStreetBets community has been the center of an epic war between large Wall Street investors and small scale social media betters. Now, it's been locked, and spooked investors appear to be dumping their shares.

Shares of GameStop and AMC dropped dramatically in after-hours trading shortly after Reddit's community was made only viewable through an invite.

See also: Reddit traders cause Wall Street havoc by buying GameStop
GameStop and Elon Musk send Reddit and Robinhood to the top of the App Store charts
'Dumb Money' Is on GameStop, and It's Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game (archive)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Socrastotle on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:20PM (3 children)

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:20PM (#1106072) Journal

    "What do you think will be this little subreddit's ultimate fate?"

    Not the subreddit but WallStreetBet's Discord just got predictably banned. Discord claimed "hate speech". Here [reddit.com] is what WSB had to say about it:

    We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.

    There's apparently a hoard of fake accounts now also running around on Twitter claiming to be them, saying all sorts of nasty stuff, presumably in order to give justification for the likely oncoming mass social media purge. The peasants have bruised the eyes of the royalty. It is time for a purge. The only question is if/when Reddit will ban them given Reddit owners have overtly come out in support of them. Reddit uses Cloudflare alongside a number of other possible middleware vectors that could be used to force them off the web if they don't play ball. This is getting super interesting!

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Socrastotle on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:02PM (2 children)

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Thursday January 28 2021, @04:02PM (#1106123) Journal

    Further extra-judicial crackdowns continue. Interactive Brokers and Robinhood have now both banned buying of Gamestop stock. If the implication there isn't clear, it means you can only sell it. Sell = price goes down = helps Wallstreet. At the same time this is happening other brokerages are having coordinated 'outages'. This includes Ameritrade, Etrade, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab. Welcome to Cartel Land: population a whole lot more than we probably ever thought.

    • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday January 29 2021, @03:10AM

      by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 29 2021, @03:10AM (#1106443) Journal

      I got an email from Robinhood indicating they'll reopen trading in gamestop tomorrow.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 29 2021, @01:08PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday January 29 2021, @01:08PM (#1106572) Homepage
      > This includes Ameritrade, ... and Charles Schwab. Welcome to Cartel Land: population a whole lot more than we probably ever thought.

      and now one less - Ameritrade is Schwab, since last year.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves