GameStop Shares Double In 90 Minutes As Reddit Site Went Down
Shares of the popular Reddit stock GameStop doubled during the final 90 minutes of trading on Wednesday, February 24, while Reddit went down.
GameStop stocks have been extremely volatile over the past few weeks, after a group of Redditors decided to step in and buy up all the stock to prevent hedge funders from short selling stock and draining all of the company’s value.
On Wednesday alone, more than 82 million GameStop shares were traded at a peak of $191 per share, which is the highest share price seen since January 27, when shares were flying for $347.51, as per The Financial Times.
Although it’s unclear what caused the sudden resurge in stock sales several weeks after the Reddit trend began, the surge came just a day after GameStop announced that its chief financial officer would be leaving the company in March. Some people believe the two are connected, but there is no confirmation that this is the case.
As per The Independent, Gust Kepler, chief executive of stocks and options platform BlackBoxStocks, explained:
The CFO exited the company and there’s talk of the company finally transforming from a brick and mortar to deploying their product in a digital way, and this is why we believe the stock shot up at the end of the day today.
However, while shares were flying, the very website responsible for the company’s trading success – Reddit – was down, with no explanation as to what happened.
The soaring success of GameStop’s trades came after a call out on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum to hit back at the multi-millionaire hedge fund operators from short selling stock for their own financial gain, which would ultimately lead to the demise of the company.
a year agoBut the meteoric success of GameStop shares has even surprised the Redditors who were behind it in the first place. Conspiracy theorists on the site questioned the timing of Reddit going down, commenting, ‘Something is up,’ and ‘Coincidence?’
In the end, the online forum site was only down for around 20 minutes, with many users receiving a message that read, ‘Our CDN was unable to reach our servers.’
A spokesperson confirmed at the time that users could go to the Reddit Status website to check if and when it was back up and running, later confirming that the site was fully back and functioning as it should.
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Topics: Technology, finance, GameStop, Now, Reddit, Shares, WallStreetBets
