It’s possible that Reddit’s army of retailers has not only been the driving force behind GameStop’s unprecedented rally that turned Wall Street upside down, according to new data.
GameStop was “remarkably absent” from the list of 10 stocks most bought by retail investors in January despite the video game retailer being at the forefront of an alleged market revolution, according to JP Morgan analysts.
“While retail buying was portrayed as the main driver of the extreme price concentration experienced by some stocks, the real picture may be much more nuanced,” Peng Cheng, head of learning strategies, wrote this week. automatic megabank.
In fact, data from Citadel Securities (which runs stock trading to launch Robinhood investments) shows that retailers generally sold more GameStop shares than they bought from Tuesday to Thursday last week. , CNBC reported.
This leaves open the possibility that institutional investors will play a more important role in the GameStop explosion than one might have guessed by reading the bad word messages on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum.
For example, hedge fund Senvest Management made nearly $ 700 million in profits from GameStop’s stake that began accumulating in September and came out after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the shares on Jan. 26, according to the Wall Street Journal.
AMC Entertainment, another loved one of the WallStreetBets crowd, was in fact one of the 10 most-bought stocks in the retail market in January, according to JP Morgan, which uses public data and its own methodology to track commercial activity.
But other companies that were dragged into the fight, such as American Airlines and fashion retailer Express, ended up among the stocks that sold the most to small business investors, the bank found.
“Retail activities were very high in January and, towards the end of the month, they captured some of the highest market shares in relation to history in terms of traded shares,” Cheng wrote.
However, he added, “Reddit users are unlikely to be the sole driver of price volatility and their behavior is not representative of the overall retail investor base.”