29 Jan 2021 / 04:11 H.
By Sagarika Jaisinghani, Shriya Ramakrishnan and Anna Irrera
Jan 28 (Reuters) - An army of retail investors that has routed Wall Street s professionals in recent days was dealt a blow on Thursday, after online brokerages Robinhood Markets Inc and Interactive Brokers restricted trading in red-hot GameStop and several other social-media darlings stocks that had soared this week.
Shares of retail favorites including GameStop and AMC Entertainment plummeted on the news and broader markets shot higher.
Retail investors, celebrities and policymakers decried the restrictions and online forums boiled with anger, accusing the trading platforms of trying to protect Wall Street s interest at the expense of smaller investors.
In the GameStop tug-of-war, bullish day traders appear to be winning over short-sellers
The video game retailer’s soaring stock price shows no sign of slowing today.
GameStop Corp.’s breathtaking ascent showed no sign of slowing Wednesday, with bullish day traders keeping the upper hand over short-sellers who started to capitulate.
The shares rose 157% to a session-high of $380 shortly after 11 a.m. in New York, leading to at least two volatility halts. The advance means the Grapevine-based video-game retailer’s market value has risen more than 20 times this month alone to about $26 billion, making GameStop bigger than more than a third of the companies in the S&P 500 Index.
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When I called Citron Research’s Andrew Left on Tuesday afternoon, I thought I had the wrong number.
He’s been using a fake voice when he picks up calls these days because he says members of Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum have been calling him nonstop. They’ve set up a fake Tinder profile for the short seller, shown up at his guardhouse, and hacked Citron’s Twitter account, all over a GameStop call he made on Twitter on January 19, he told me.
“They’re harassing me however they can,” Left said. “This hasn’t happened before.”
Left has long been in the business of controversy, having published market commentary for 17 years that frequently accuses companies of fraud. And he’s been right before: according to Citron’s website, 50 companies covered by the company have been targets of regulatory intervention since 2001.
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(Reuters) - A slugfest between Wall Street and Main Street took an unexpected turn late on Wednesday after moderators of a stock trading forum that has helped fuel massive rallies in the shares of GameStop temporarily closed its doors.
Shares of GameStop and other companies tumbled in extended trading after Wallstreetbets, a discussion forum popular with retail traders on the Reddit website, briefly turned invitation-only. They pared those losses around an hour later, when the forum opened back up.
“We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad night’s sleep. We’ve got so many comments and submissions that we can’t possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators,” read a message from the group’s moderators after Wallstreetbets reopened.