STILL GOT ‘GAME’!
‘Stop’ shares rally for 5th straight day
GameStop shares soared to their highest level in more than a month Tuesday as the video-game retailer’s pivot to e-commerce added more fuel to Reddit’s favorite “meme stock.”
Shares in the Texas-based company surged 27 percent, or $52.40, to $246.90 on their fifth consecutive day in the green.
Other stocks that WallStreetBets pumped up in recent months also got a fresh boost Tuesday. Shares of beleaguered cinema chain AMC Entertainment rose 13 percent, while former smartphone maker BlackBerry jumped 7 percent and telecom firm Nokia climbed 2 percent.
GameStop’s Tuesday surge built on the 41 percent gain the shares notched Monday after revealing that Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen had taken the reins to shift to a digitally focused gaming business.
The announcement created fresh hype around GameStop on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, which thrust the struggling brick-and-mortar chain into the center of a stock-market revolution by driving its share price as high as $483 in late January.
“Still time to hop on board GME . . . final preparations are in place before lift off but the gate is still open!” a Reddit user named jbver wrote in a Tuesday morning post that featured a video of SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket.
The VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment
ETF — a newly launched fund that tracks stocks that are popular online — bounced 4.2 percent to $24.07, outpacing the broader market.
“A lot of these retail traders are newer traders in the market, and they’re really going to focus on what they know,” Jake Wujastyk, chief market analyst at TrendSpider, told The Post. “If you’ve been trading only GameStop and AMC, if you’re a newer trader, that’s all you know, so that’s what you’re naturally going to gravitate toward once you start trading again.”
Cohen, an activist investor, helped light the fuse for GameStop’s initial explosion because some in the Reddit crowd predicted he would turn the company around after joining the board in January. Retail traders then pumped up GameStop and other stocks to pressure hedge funds that had bet against them.
One of Cohen’s fans is Keith Gill, the trader known as “DeepF--kingValue” on Reddit who’s been credited with spearheading the GameStop rally.
Gill revealed in a Reddit post that the value of his GameStop stake grew by $8.5 million on Monday as the shares spiked.
GameStop’s Tuesday surge came as the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on the recent retailinvesting boom. Gill testified at a similar hearing last month before the House Financial Services Committee.