The GameStop boom: what exactly is happening on Wall Street?
NEW YORK: It has been a wild week for GameStop.
Shares of the struggling US video game retailer surged to more than $US480 ($NZ670) a share yesterday before plunging to just over $200 about noon (local time), and eventually closing at $US193.60, falling well below their previous day’s close of $347.51.
At the start of 2021, shares of GameStop closed at $17.25 on January 4.
The primary reason for the earlier surge? Smaller investors, also often known as ‘‘retail investors’’, who have banded together in places such as news aggregation and discussion site Reddit, under the subreddit (forum) r/WallStreetBets.
And it is not just GameStop. Shares of AMC Entertainment jumped more than 230% on Thursday as the Twitter trend #SaveAMC spread amid concerns the movie theatre chain might file for bankruptcy due to the Covid19 pandemic keeping moviegoers away.
So what is going on?