What happened with GameStop? Everything you need to know about Robinhood, Reddit and short-selling
The only thing GameStop has delivered on is cost-cutting measures, including progressively reducing its workforce to less than half of the 23,000 employees it had in 2017. Austerity remains the recipe, but there is no clear strategy in sight to offset the unstoppable decline in video game sales and competition in the e-commerce sector. And, the theory goes, many retail investors used their cheques to invest in the stock market. In the past month, I have been told multiple times hedge funds were too clever to allow this again.
Sources familiar with Melvin Capital confirmed to ABC News that the hedge fund lost 53% of its total investments in January. “So it started out as kind of a little bit of a value investing story,” he added. “But then this sort of technical phenomenon, which is called a short squeeze, that was really sort the dynamite that was thrown on the kindling.”
- After all, similar, although perhaps less blatant, conflicts of interest are rife within investment banks whose analysts pump out research on assets while their traders buy and sell them.
- With Joe Biden signing off a $1.9tn (£1.4tn) economic relief bill on Thursday, a load of new cheques are likely to arrive on people’s doorsteps in the coming weeks.
- Sharp losses for short sellers may have pushed them to sell some of their other stock holdings to raise cash, and several investors say that contributed to Wednesday’s 2.6% slide for the S&P 500.
- Enthusiasm has grown for GameStop’s prospects after the company said earlier this month that a co-founder of Chewy, the online seller of pet supplies, was joining its board.
- “So it started out as kind of a little bit of a value investing story,” he added.
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The short squeeze had worked (although some short sellers are thought to still have yet to unwind their positions, presumably because they are hoping the price will fall and their losses will be reduced). The price rose steadily but other funds were betting against GameStop by short-selling large numbers of shares. One unlikely beneficiary has been GameStop, a struggling video games retailer that has been hit hard by the pandemic.
Dumb Money culminates in a sense of triumph for what is liquidity mining defi beginner’s guide 2023 the Davids over the Goliaths. Most of the individual investors portrayed are shown as having made money. The amount Gill made isn’t clear, though we see he’s bought his brother a new car, an indication he came out ahead. The real-life Gill didn’t participate in the film or in the book it’s based on, Ben Mezrich’s The Antisocial Network. Still, both analysts said the latest spike in GameStop marks an example of the considerable role everyday investors can play in the price movement of individual stocks.
Jan. 22, 2021: GameStop surges 50%
And many of these retail investors are looking at “meme” stocks such as GameStop. Earlier that day the share price had soared to nearly $350 (£250) times more than this time last year. A few days later, Tyler Winklevoss tweeted a link to reports about the film and said that when the movie comes out he and his brother will be renting AMC theaters (another popular stock within r/wallstreetbets) for “premiere parties.”
This is a massively simplified explanation of something called shorting, or short selling – words you might’ve seen cropping up in your feeds in the last few days. “Our shorthand is, it’s not xom insider trading activity just a movie, it’s a movement,” Angelo said. Some big names lost money on GameStop, but others made a bundle. The same goes for everyday investors — some won, some lost, and plenty were just in it for the casino-like ride.
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But analysts still expect GameStop to keep losing money in its next fiscal year. The frenzy hit new heights Thursday when several trading platforms limited their customers from making certain trades with GameStop. With the stock price high, many people will feel like that gamble has paid off. “My sense is hedge funds are like, ‘Oh, they’re going to get excited again, maybe we can ride the thing up’. Wall Street sometimes refers to these kinds of investors as “dumb money”. And that, in turn, is having a real-world bitcoin can hit $16k but only if this resistance level finally breaks effect on the share price right now.
Should investors buy GameStop while it’s rising?
In the fiscal year 2018 GameStop, which is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, was $673 million in the red; in 2019 it lost $471 million; in 2020, $215 million; in 2021, another $381 million; and in 2022, $313 million. Over $2 billion in five years, according to accounts filed with the U.S. Store closures and cost-cutting have reduced losses in the first half of the year to $53 million, but they have also taken their toll on sales, which fell by 4.5%. The company has had an isolated quarter of profits in the last two years, which sparked euphoria, but it was a mirage. GameStop’s shares slumped by 40% in 25 minutes on Wednesday, after a few days of frenetic growth. “This has captured the attention of America and every trader and non-trader alike,” Left said.