New York (AFP)
Become the symbol of the rebellion of small shareholders against the powerful on Wall Street in January, GameStop continues to mobilize six months later, with the hope of biting the dust with some hedge funds.
The story grabbed the headlines for several weeks and helped new market players like the hot young platform Robinhood set to debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
In a few days at the beginning of the year, the action of the chain of video game stores went from around $ 17 to nearly 500.
The title was boosted by small investors determined to do battle with institutional investors who had bet heavily on the stock market collapse of GameStop and were taken back.
Some hedge funds have lost big, to the point of sometimes having to go out of business.
Launched from the WallStreetBets forum on the Reddit platform, the movement has taken in its wake thousands of individuals, from students to retirees, some of whom have collected large sums of money.
Overwhelmed by the flow of purchases, several brokers like Robinhood had to suspend trading and were accused of dismissing the small in favor of a few big ones in finance.
- "Pandora's box" -
Six months later, trading volumes have melted and GameStop is no longer making the headlines.
But far from having fallen like a breath, the action is still worth ten times its price at the beginning of January and its supporters are still numbered in the hundreds.
Many on Reddit advocate the “transformation” of the GameStop business, with an emphasis on e-commerce, and take offense to the title being presented only as a way to make a quick buck.
They also reject comparisons with other "same stocks", actions that have benefited from the mobilization of small carriers, such as the chain of cinemas AMC or the health insurer Clover Health.
In addition to adhering to GameStop's business model, we cling to GME (its abbreviation) to "see what will happen when short sellers are forced out," says Ka12n, contacted on Reddit, who says he owns titles chain.
Officially, short sales, a purely speculative instrument, weigh just over 10% of GameStop's shares, which remains high.
But there are many who suspect institutional investors of using undeclared financial instruments to speculate heavily on the stock.
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For Shorty-hunter (who did not want to reveal his identity), also contacted on Reddit, the manipulation is there, not with the small holders who have only bought shares and keep them, for the most part.
"January was just the beginning," said Jonathan Royère, who owns GameStop titles.
"Pandora's box has been opened and most shareholders refuse to sell."
- "Democratization of trading" -
"I did not think that individual investors could move prices so much," admits Meir Statman, professor of finance at Santa Clara University, specializing in the study of financial decisions.
"I was wrong," he says.
"When small savers come together, they have the same strength as a large institutional investor."
However, "I do not think that this is a broad movement" likely to upset the world of finance, considers the academic.
"It's more of a curiosity than a kind of new force in the market."
For Angelo Kourkafas, of the investment company Edward Jones, the GameStop affair is above all the manifestation of a "democratization of trading", favored by technological innovation.
In particular, it has enabled the emergence of new players such as Robinhood or Webull, for whom operations are free.
In particular thanks to these new instruments, this renewed appetite of small savers for the stock market since the start of the pandemic, after the traumas of 2000 and 2008, "will last", anticipates Angelo Kourkafas.
After the GameStop episode, overwhelmed by a movement it had not seen, part of Wall Street cried wolf, fearing that a fanaticized horde on the internet would come and wreck the world of finance.
But the heat waves have so far been limited to a few corners of the financial markets, underlines the investment advisor, "and have not presented a threat to the market".
© 2021 AFP