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GameStop Up 400% for Week as Traders 'Hold the Line' Despite Robinhood Cap

Published 01/29/2021, 04:39 PM
Updated 01/29/2021, 05:21 PM
© Reuters

© Reuters

By Yasin Ebrahim

Investing.com – GameStop rallied four-fold in just five trading days as the Redditors put the squeeze on the short sellers on Friday despite trading platforms including Robinhood imposing limits on trading for the second day in a row.  

GameStop (NYSE:GME) rallied 68% on Friday, racking up a 400% gain for the week. Baring a surge to $413.98 and dip to $250 intraday, the trading action in GameStop was confined to within the $300 price level, though the restrictions imposed on the traders most likely played a role. 

AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) rose 54% on the day, Naked Brand Group Ltd (NASDAQ:NAKD) rose 19%, while Express (NYSE:EXPR) was up 28% and Blackberry (TSX:BB) climbed 6%.

Robinhood was at the center of attention after the trading platform limited traders to buying just a single share of GameStop, MC, Koss and Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA). The popular trading platform went a step further, expanding restrictions on a list of stocks to 50 to include Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) and Beyond Meat (NASDAQ:BYND). Traders were also limited to just two purchases of stock in Bed Bath & Beyond Inc (NASDAQ:BBBY)and Qualtric.           

The battle between the retail traders versus the Wall Street short-sellers continued to captivate and divide opinion on Wall Street. 

"There is no reality to [these] trades ... they not based on anything other than speculation," said William Galvin, Massachusetts Secretary of State. "The issue of shorting has to be addressed by the national regulator." 

Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O’Shares ETFs and co-host of "Shark Tank," disagrees. "The best thing we could do for this market is leave it alone," O’Leary said on CNBC. He argued that no one was considering whether GameStop executives would take advantage of recent appreciate in their stock price to raise capital, build a brand and pivot "just like Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) did when they were shipping out CDs in the mail."  

 

 

Latest comments

They Big Guys been Manipulating the Markets for decades, allowing to short 140% of a company is just unreal and yet we see the very few tell us why we should get back in line and follow the rules... Short selling should be illegal, it's allowed in Canada so manipulation everywhere. Wake up
*Naked short selling should be illegal,
Short selling should be allowed only if you own the shares. Naked shorting must be outlawed but so should be this crowd manipulation.
Reading all of these comments made me realize that most people here do not know what market manipulation is. Trading individually or with a group of people with the intent to artificially push the price up in order to trigger a short squeeze is a typical manipulation scheme called cornering the market. It is illegal. Just because people meet and conspire online via Reddit and similar platforms, using pseudonyms, does not make it legal. It is a criminal offense and there are significant potential legal consequences. Consult a good lawyer before engaging in such trades to get a more detailed explanation.
You may read the article to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2331322?seq=1
HAHA I'M UP $37,000 FOLLOWING THE CROWD.
Call the waaaahhhhhmbulance 😭😭😭
SEC will make common man scapegoat and fed will bail out hedge fund. Typical Bollywood movie playing @ WallStreet
Yeah right, common men who get organized via social media to crowdfund market cornering manipulation schemes. They think they won't get caught just because they are using pseudonyms. We'll see what happens once the SEC starts probing.
ok boomer i see everywhere with the hatress against retailer
Market goes through rather serious pullback and this site cannot find anything better than putting bunch of meaningless “gamestop” articles to forefront.
Mostly because the correction was expected and isnt really news at all
 it is not a correction yet and it is an important investment issue at the moment whether it becomes a correction. That’s the real issue that investors are supposed to think about today preparing plans for next week. This site distract them with this meaningless “news” about bunch of fools obsessed with nothing.
They are whining and pouting because the fed doesnt come out and say “poor wallstreet we are going to keep spoonfeeding you”.. the fact that everything dropped except retail proves the drops are engineered to force perception. Its a joke.
If you have not figured out the corrupt players, you never will.
Anyone is a fool paying hubdreds for a stock that's worth a couple bucks. The players in this game are gonna' ****themselves.
each individuals will lose at most thousands, when hedge funds will lose billions. You don't get it.
Dude!! We all know that the man with the gold makes the rules. I'm nobody, but I make a good living playing this game , sidestepping the big players.
so as suspected, the intent here is clearly to attack the hedge funds and trigger a short squeeze.
SEC: Are You getting ALL this ??
robinhood go bankrupt if they can't handle their job
This fight is not over yet. Average Joes forced short selling hedge funds to cover (ie r/o/b wall street) If u dont hold ur line, they come back a short these stocks to dealth for vengence. Then the media have something to cheer.
short selling is banned on bank financial institution. protecting the shark? and now protecting the shortsellimg hedgefund? int. rate are manipulated low versus inflation..fed does not do its job for mainstreet...this will shortly ***up im the face of the ones who think they can squeeze the people every corner !
This is global, Robinhood can't do scheit.
1) "Robinhood was at the center of attention ..." Don't feel the need to mention that Robinhood is facing a class-action lawsuit over their actions? 2) "There is no reality to [these] trades ... they not based on anything other than speculation," said William Galvin, Massachusetts Secretary of State Who is this dope?
Bidens friend
SEC should do its Job and take down Hedgefunds short-ladder the stock, while RobinHood and others restrickt FREE trade. And maby somebody sholdt look at greedy hedgers ability too short stocks 150%...
Reddit traders are manipulating the market through a classic cornering the market scheme. SEC should do its job and prosecute those acting with criminal intent.
uh huh. No.
is it really criminal when all the financial papers you read are clearly written to do the same.
Yes it is. In fact it is a textbook example of market manipulation. I have read another comment of yours on this post, you wrote people may lose thousands but hedge funds will lose billions. It is clear that the general attitude matches yours. Trading with the intent to cause a short squeeze is an attempt at market manipulation. When people get organized through social media with the same intent they basically crowdfund a typical manipulation scheme: cornering the market to trigger a short squeeze. You'll soon see the legal repercussions of such behavior.
Banks say trump is valuable because of his brand (when they welfared him through it). Why isnt gamestop?
same smart*** who buying bitcoin just to prove something to somebody
Exactly. I think they are proving their point just fine. Shorting is not any less worse for the market.
What wrong proving something?
 I think plenty of them have that intent, but a lot of people will fight hard to not cash in.
are robinhood "traders" typical losers live in mom's basement?
They are winners, small guys that outsmart the big guys. It's not the big that eat the small, it's the quick that eat the slow
So what? proud to be a loser. The only difference between them and winners, is winners live on a yacht and get cleaned up by hoooookers instead of their mum.
Haha, "mom's basement" is going to 10,000 sq feet next month.
power to the players
The market has circuit-breakers in place. Why weren't they being triggered? That's what the legislators need to investigate..that and the stock restrictions that brokers were imposing. The SEC should fine them so heavily they will never pull that nonsense again!
I bought 200 shares of kass after the open. wouldnt let me buy gme price dropped i closed the position bit they flipped the breaker. I didn't known what was happening i hit it again and it hit me for another 200. with a half hour I was out 9k due to there freezing the stock bs
circuit breakers are for down movement.
and autocorrect never works in these little text boxes, please fix that
Have you ever been in a GameSpot? Yawn. There's a reason they were struggling - they ******* It's irrational to prop up a company that no longer has a reason to exist
It doesn't matter if people want to buy it for value or for a squeeze; if they are self-directed investors they are supposed to be able to trade as they see fit and under the terms they reasonably expect. The only reasonable fix by rule, regulation or intervention is banning or restricting short selling. I mean they are trying the other "choice", which is restricting longs, but it is obviously a travesty and unreasonable to do what they are in fact doing. And no matter how many ways people try to double-speak it no one can make people believe that retail investors buying and holding stock is destabilizing or unreasonable. Either the whole financial system is a sham or something is wrong with the way shorting is operating. Or everything is fine. Trilemma, choose a horn.
I buy their for most holidays and birthdays. Thr fact that every person new what gamestop is before this even happened makes it an extremely powerful brand
Oh yes, this is the FIRST time the market has ever been irrational, it's AWFUL!
Restrictive trading is the investment equivalent of censorship on social media.
Restrictive trading is not censorship, it's a classic scam if you think about it... Or let's put it like this, every path retail traders CAN choose lead to their destruction...
Imagine the turnaround gamestop could have from this. They were certainly selling shares for a hefty profit. Their market cap will be huge. Increases their future potential in a crazy way. Watch it turn into the next blue chip tech stock. Better than that, i could see them being an aqcuisition by Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or one of the big players. There will be much good news to follow.
how is gamespot going to compete digitally with valve, microsoft, sony and epic? why would any of the big players buy a brick and mortar business that sells disc based games while they are all selling their own games? Microsoft could squeeze these guys out buy not allowing all their IPs to be sold there and GS would die if you can't buy fall out or the next elder scrolls there lol. Then you guys who killed short selling will be wishing short selling was still around so you could hammer microsoft.
It's not about the stock just being shorted. It's that the stock was being shorted beyond 100%, the price was being kept artificially low, and dirty tactics were being used to drive the company out of business. People are focusing on the wrong thing.
it's all artificial broooo :)
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