GAMESTONK II: WHAT'S THE SEQUEL FOR WALLSTREETBETS?
We have all been blessed to be alive at a time when a loose coalition of Internet randos can band together to drive the value of a failing stock into the stratosphere and utterly clean out short-sellers who had bet on the stock's decline.
That's the rough synopsis of “Gamestonk,” the financial event this week where a band of retail investors largely organized by the Reddit forum WallStreetBets wildly drove up share prices for the fledgling video game retailer GameStop.
Institutional investors and their allies are working hard to ensure this never happens again, with the Robinhood trading app suspending trading on stocks targeted by WallStreetBets. This was then followed closely by the firm Discord kicking WallStreetBets off their servers for alleged “hate speech” (the forum is now back online).
But if there's anything we know about the internet, it's that a committed online community pledged to screw with entrenched business interests can never truly be stopped (remember 1990s music piracy?).
WallStreetBets' signature strategy could best be described as “short-seller hunting”: Target a failing stock that has attracted the attention of short-sellers and then pull the rug out from underneath them by artificially driving up the price of that stock in a buying spree.
So, with all that in mind, where will the WallStreetBets short squeeze cannon be aimed next?
KOSS CORP
WallStreetBets like to target small stocks where they'll have a bigger impact; that's why you're not seeing any WallStreetBets buzz on major short-sold stocks such as Apple or Intel. In all this, Koss is perfect: It's a `50s-era headphone company being utterly buried in a diversified home electronics market, and with annual sales of only about $20 million, it's exquisitely small. Their stock price went up 500 per cent on Wednesday.
BED, BATH AND BEYOND
Aside from GameStop, it's one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the S&P 1500 — and largely for the same reasons. Bed, Bath and Beyond is a legacy brick-and-mortar retailer that has been smacked by the onetwo punch of online shopping and the COVID-19 pandemic. Its share price has been on a roller coaster of the largest gain in its history, followed immediately by the biggest loss in its history. One of the hedge funds with a major short on Bed, Bath and Beyond, meanwhile, is Melvin Capital, which has particularly attracted the ire of the WallStreetBets crowd.
CLOVIS ONCOLOGY
Easily the least-recognizable company on this list, Clovis is a small cancer research company that has gotten into trouble in recent years for overstating the effectiveness of one of its lung cancer treatments. But it started getting traction with retail investors for the simple reason that more than one-third of its shares are in the hands of short-sellers. And with Clovis shares only $7 as of Monday, they're also within reach of anyone with spare cash. So that's probably why it's now one of the world's hottest biotechnology stocks.
AMC THEATRES
Nostalgia likely helped to fuel WallStreetBets' decision to target GameStop. The video game store was a regular haunt for many of the millennials now filling the ranks of retail investors, and they appear to have pursued Gamestonk not only as a money-making venture, but as a kind of moral crusade to crush the short-sellers betting on GameStop's destruction. So, enter AMC Theatres; a heavily shorted cinema company whose locations have also hosted plenty of fond millennial childhood memories. Shares of AMC went up nearly 300 per cent Wednesday.
AMERICAN AIRLINES
To be clear; none of the companies on this list are prime targets for any sane, material reason. Nothing has changed in their management or ability to make money, and groundlevel employees at GameStop or AMC are just as baffled as everyone else by recent events. But it only took the stock getting some mentions on WallStreetBets to send it soaring. A Reddit forum is now in the unique situation where, by merely indicating interest in a stock, they can launch a gold rush. In a more innocent time, this would have been a power typically reserved for a handful of influential investors like Carl Icahn or Warren Buffett.