Wall Street was contemplating big wins from the Reddit-fueled retail frenzy in stocks such as GameStop on Thursday, even though many hedge funds in …
Wall Street was contemplating big wins from the Reddit-fueled retail frenzy in stocks such as GameStop on Thursday, even though many hedge funds in its ranks were nursing losses. Shares in GameStop, whose motto is “power to the players,” and other heavily shorted stocks such as AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry, Koss Corp, and Express Inc soared this week, as traders on Reddit and other social media platforms snapped them up. These trades forced hedge funds “shorting” the stocks to cover their positions, costing them billions of dollars and further fuelling a rally that caught many by surprise. But the tide started to turn on Thursday as some top Wall Street firms disclosed how they had benefited from the feeding frenzy, while others came up with new trades to make a profit. Silver Lake took advantage of a 301% surge in struggling movie theater chain AMC’s shares on Wednesday to convert $600 million in convertible notes into its shares.