The GameStop Stock Saga: A Postmortem
Milton Ezrati, 07 February 2021
So much has been written about GameStop stock it seems pointless to offer yet another take on its saga now. It also seems pointless to guess what motivated the Reddit crowd or why the short sellers hung on for as long as they did. All that is water over the dam, as the saying goes.
At this point, the adventure carries two important and age-old investment lessons: One is that taking part in a buying frenzy leads to at least as many losers as winners, usually more, for there are many in the Reddit crowd who enthusiastically bought at highs and have suffered significant losses. The second is that shorting is a very risky business. Both lessons should now be clear, even when seen through the tears of those who lost. What deserves attention here is that, with a few notable exceptions, the media made a hash of covering these events. Continue reading “Article: The GameStop Stock Saga: A Postmortem”
Tencent-backed ByteDance rival Kuaishou Technology (1024 HK) ripped +160% in its Hong Kong IPO today in the second-best IPO performance ever behind Alibaba’s +193% gain back in 2007 (BABA went private before going public again in 2014). The company raised $5.4B from investors. Yesterday we did a deep dive on the company, which you can access here.
As just about everyone knows by now, investors communicating on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets drove up the stock price of GameStop while openly discussing both their tactics and their reasoning. Some of them purchased GameStop shares as part of a strategy expressly intended to squeeze hedge funds that were shorting the stock. Others simply saw the stock as undervalued.
In a matter of days, GameStop has gone from being a dying retail chain to the latest obsession of media and markets. Along the way, the GameStop saga has morphed into a lesson in American populism, an allegory of Main Street taking a pound of flesh from Wall Street.