GameStop shares were up their all-time high in more than a month on Tuesday, as the video game store’s pivot to e-commerce added more fuel to Reddit’s favorite ‘meme stock’.
Shares of the Texas-based company were up 26 percent to a peak of $ 246.35 on their fifth straight day in the green.
Other stocks that WallStreetBets has pumped up in recent months also received a new boost on Tuesday. Shares of beleaguered cinema chain AMC Entertainment were up nearly 16 percent during their session high, while former smartphone maker BlackBerry jumped about 10 percent and telecom company Nokia climbed 3.6 percent.
GameStop’s rise on Tuesday built on the 41 percent gain the stock made on Monday after Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen took the reins of the shift to a digitally focused gaming company.
The announcement sparked new hype around GameStop on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, which pushed the struggling physical chain into the center of a stock market revolution by pushing the stock price to $ 483 in late January.
“Still time to jump aboard GME … final preparations have been made before takeoff, but the gate is still open!” a Reddit user named jbver wrote in a Tuesday morning post featuring a video of SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket.
The VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment ETF – a newly launched fund that tracks stocks that are popular online – bounced 4.7 percent to an all-day high of $ 24.19, outpacing the broader market.
“Many of these retailers are newer traders to the market and they will really focus on what they know,” Jake Wujastyk, TrendSpider’s chief market analyst, told The Post. “If you’ve only traded GameStop and AMC, that’s all you know if you’re a newer trader, so that’s where you’ll naturally gravitate toward when you start trading again.”
Cohen, an activist investor, helped light the fuse for GameStop’s first explosion, as some in the Reddit crowd predicted he would change the company after he joined the board in January. Retailers then pumped up GameStop and other stocks to put pressure on hedge funds that had bet against them.
One of Cohen’s fans is Keith Gill, the merchant known as “DeepF-ingValue” on Reddit who has been in charge of the GameStop rally.
Gill revealed in a Reddit post that the value of his GameStop stake grew by $ 8.5 million on Monday as the stock rallied.
GameStop’s rise on Tuesday came when the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on the recent boom in retail investments. Gill testified at a similar hearing before the Home Financial Services Committee last month.