GameStop’s stock reached its highest level in more than a month on Tuesday, when the video game retailer’s pivot for e-commerce added more fuel to Reddit’s favorite “meme stock”.
Shares in the Texas-based company rose 26 percent to a peak of $ 246.35 on its fifth consecutive day in the green.
Other stocks that WallStreetBets pumped in the past few months also received a new boost on Tuesday. Shares in the AMC Entertainment cinema network were up almost 16 percent at the high of the session, while the former smartphone maker BlackBerry was up about 10 percent and telecommunications company Nokia was up 3.6 percent.
GameStop’s increase on Tuesday was based on the 41 percent share gain made on Monday, after revealing that Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen took the reins of the move to a digitally-focused gaming business .
The announcement created a new wave of enthusiasm around GameStop on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, which pushed the struggling brick and mortar network to the center of a stock market revolution by raising its stock price to $ 483 in the end of January.
“There is still time to board the GME … final preparations are underway before takeoff, but the gate is still open!” a Reddit user named jbver wrote in a post on Tuesday morning 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 – jumped 4.7 percent to an intraday high of $ 24.19, overtaking the broader market.
“Many of these retailers are newer players on the market and they are really going to focus on what they know,” TrendSpider chief market analyst Jake Wujastyk told Post. “If you’ve only been trading GameStop and AMC, if you’re a newer trader, that’s all you know, so that’s what you’ll naturally gravitate to 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 that he would change the company after joining the board in January. Retail traders then pumped GameStop and other stocks to put pressure on the hedge funds that had bet against them.
One of Cohen’s fans is Keith Gill, the dealer known as “DeepF – ingValue” on Reddit, who was credited for leading the GameStop rally.
Gill revealed in a post on Reddit that the value of his stake in GameStop grew by $ 8.5 million on Monday as stocks soared.
GameStop’s rise on Tuesday came as the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on the recent retail investment boom. Gill testified at a similar hearing last month before the House’s Financial Services Committee.