Once again, GME (GME) is taking investors on a wild ride.
The stock opened at $ 269 on Wednesday morning, before steadily rising – in GameStop terms – to $ 347 just after noon. Upon reaching that peak, it fell 43%, to $ 198 in just over 30 minutes, before rising again to $ 257 an hour later.
In the midst of all the action, the stock was interrupted seven times between 12:22 and 1h12p
Although not exactly the 18 stops on January 28, it represented another massive increase in GameStop’s volatility.
Keith Gill, the original GameStop value investor from r / WallStreetBets, followed the day’s journey in a series of gifs and videos from his Twitter account.
While Gill is GameStop’s most famous investor, the positive price movement that started on Monday probably came from Ryan Cohen, the founder who had already acquired a 10% stake in GameStop last September and joined the board in January, before the first wild ride of the action. On Wednesday, news broke that Cohen would take on a role at the company, taking over the reins of the e-commerce part of the business.
After Cohen’s prescient investment, as well as his personal history with the founding and leadership of an extremely successful e-commerce brand, Chewy, investors returned to the meme stock.
Interestingly, the recent increase in GameStop’s stock did not coincide with an increase in short sales, as it did during the last episode in late January, according to data from S3 Partners. This current race is very different, lacking any kind of short squeeze behavior, whether in the numbers or in the public narrative that previously saw short selling hedge funds confronting retail investors looking for revenge. (This narrative was false, hedge funds were on both sides of this business.)
Speaking to Bloomberg on Monday, Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of analytics firm S3 Partners, said short sellers have lost $ 6 billion in 2021 so far on GameStop this year – $ 609 million on Monday alone. market.
This may be the reason why interest rates dropped further on Wednesday, coinciding with GameStop’s higher prices. As the graph above shows, this is the least interest uncovered in a long time.
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Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer for Yahoo Finance with a focus on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines and more. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.