The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gamestop surge offers stuck investors a way out
Shares of video game retailer charged back from three-week rout.
The sudden surge that sent Gamestop Corp. to $200 late Wednesday made for an amusing chart, but for people who bought at the height of the meme-stock craze, it was no joke.
Shares of the video game retailer roared back from a threeweek rout, touching prices as much as four times as high as the closing level Tuesday. Trading after hours Wednesday evening went off at an average price of close to $135 a share. That’s a lot of liquidity to sell into for bulls who have been holding the bag in the erstwhile day-trader darling for four weeks.
Gamestop spent about seven sessions trading above Wednesday’s closing price of $91.71, from Jan. 26 through Feb. 3. Over a period of seven sessions from Jan. 26 to Feb. 3, 364 million shares changed hands at a volume-weighted average price of $185.39, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. At $200 a share in after-hours trading, that’s a gain of 8% from such levels.
“Gamestop is back in the game,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research. “It almost seems as if these investors are saying, ‘Maybe it’s safe to go back in the water.’”
This week’s Gamestop revival suggests that the power of the stuck-at-home day trader is far from diminished. Retail traders now account for 23% of volume on the $33 trillion U.S. equities market, up from 20% last year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
Their influence was apparent in the scrum in Gamestop shares. Volume was more than 10 times that of the day before and more than five times the average over the past 12 months. The vast majority of the trades late in the day were “odd lots,” or orders for fewer than 100 shares, and many were for only a single share.