GameStop shares rose to their highest level in more than a month on Tuesday as the video game retailer’s e-commerce pivot added more fuel to Reddit’s favorite “stock meme”.
Shares of the Texas-based company rose 26 percent to a high of $ 246.35 on the fifth day in a row on the green.
Other stocks that WallStreetBets increased in recent months also gained new momentum on Tuesday. Shares of the besieged AMC Entertainment chain rose nearly 16 percent in the peak session, while former smartphone maker BlackBerry jumped about 10 percent and telecom company Nokia rose 3.6 percent.
Tuesday’s rise in GameStop was based on 41% of earnings from shares recorded on Monday after it was revealed that Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen had taken the reins his move to a digitally focused gaming business.
The announcement created a new hype around GameStop on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, which propelled the struggling brick and mortar chain to the center of a stock market revolution pushing its stock price to $ 483 in late January. .
“It’s still time to get on board the GME … final preparations are underway before we leave, but the door is still open!” a Reddit user named jbver wrote in a Tuesday morning post featuring a video of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.
The VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF, a recently launched fund that tracks popular stocks online, bounced 4.7 percent to an intraday high of $ 24.19, surpassing the broader market.
“A lot of these retailers are newer market players and they’ll really focus on what they know,” Jake Wujastyk, TrendSpider’s lead market analyst, told The 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’re going to naturally gravitate to once you go back to trading.”
Cohen, an activist investor, helped ignite the fuse of GameStop’s initial explosion because some of the people at Reddit predicted he would turn the company around after joining the board in January. Retailers then increased GameStop and other stocks to pressure hedge funds that had bet against them.
One of Cohen’s followers is Keith Gill, the trader known as “DeepF-ingValue” on Reddit, who has been credited with directing the GameStop rally.
Gill revealed in a Reddit post that the value of its stake in GameStop grew $ 8.5 million on Monday as shares rose.
Tuesday’s rise in GameStop came as the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on the recent boom in retail investment. Gill testified at a similar hearing last month before the House Financial Services Committee.