On Thursday morning, retail traders bought the dip generated by everyone excavating the graves of meme stocks on Tuesday and Wednesday. Both GameStop GME, +0.38% and AMC Entertainment AMC, +6.37% started the holiday-shortened week in a nosedive, with both stocks falling sharply from Tuesday morning to midday Thursday before sudden potent rallies fueled by Reddit chatter and Twitter hashtags saw both stocks recover dramatically, with AMC almost erasing its weekly loss.
The narrative on Wall Street heading into Tuesday was that meme stocks were suffering from a malaise, owing to retail traders losing interest as the COVID pandemic fades and summer draws many of them away from the markets, while some Wall Street analysts have even decided to stop covering meme stocks, claiming that they don’t trade on sound analysis. While news of GameStop adding more fulfillment space sparked loud social media chatter, and AMC’s CEO may have made a massive concession to the individual investors who own roughly 80% of the company’s float, the only thing that seemed to re-ignite meme bulls was growing chatter that they were done fighting. As rumors spread that meme stocks were approaching a bear market, referring to the power couple as an example, individual investors known as “Apes” began to unite using one of their favorite weapons: hashtags. The hashtag #ApesNotLeaving began trending on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon, evoking a growing outcry from the retail investor community that they had not yet started fighting what they see as market manipulation by hedge funds using synthetic shorts on stocks that mainstream finance wants crippled. On Wednesday morning, prominent retail trading influencer and YouTube personality @TradesTrey tweeted, “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – the price is psychological.” “A discount should delight you if you believe a stock is worth “x” and it is trading at “x – y.” Patience.”
Trey tweeted three hours later, “#ApesNotLeaving.” As shares of AMC and GameStop plummeted, many on Reddit rapped their fellow “paper-handed Apes” on the figurative knuckles for presumably selling out as the stocks plunged, as well as slammed hedge funds for producing what they regarded as a false fall. “Who will be purchasing AMC today when the market opens?” asked Hot-Brief-779 on the popular subreddit r/AMCStock at 8 a.m. EST. “I’ll buy more when it drops further lower!” said ApopkaHoosier, one of over 570 customers who did so. “When this squeezes, [hedge funds] want me to be fabulously rich!” On Thursday, trading volume in GameStop was about one-third of its daily average, but AMC shares were just off the mark, and the stock’s movement was even frothier, with social media mentions of the theater chain trending on their own. The hashtags #AMCThreshold and #AMCSTRONG were particularly popular. If anything, Thursday’s action demonstrated that in the meme stock world, there is no force more powerful than the belief that everyday investors have been defeated by short sellers. The retail crowd’s search for “MOASS”: The Mother of All Short Squeezes, according to one tweet that summed up the day’s parabolic swing, is far from over. “If you even try to argue that millions woke up at 4 a.m. to sell off enormous sums of shares to create simultaneous MASSIVE dumps across many stocks & Crypto, you’re f***ing delusional,” tweeted @Katniss AMC. “This is going to be wild,” she said. “#APESNOTLEAVING,” she added./n
