GameStop is cashing in after a meme stock boom sent shares flying as high as 350% this month—and it’s leaving investors holding the bag, just as the company reported disappointing quarterly numbers.
In a regulatory disclosure filed this morning, GameStop announced it was selling up to 45 million shares, which are worth about $950 million at current market prices. That’s a big windfall for company that only reported around $6 billion in revenues last year, but the day traders who juiced GameStop’s shares in the first place are paying the price: The stock fell over 20% after the disclosure, and it’s down around 70% from its peak earlier this week.
GameStop’s stock sale is a bearish signal that suggests the stock pump is dying out as investors collect their winnings before shares slip even further.
“It appears to me that the mini bubble is collapsing,” said Giacomo Pierantoni, head of data at Vanda Research.
GameStop’s shares soared Monday after Keith Gill, a day trader who does by the name Roaring Kitty, posted a series of cryptic messages on X after a multi-year hiatus from the platform. Gill was the ringleader of the band of meme stock investors who in 2021 got together on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets and piled into GameStop and a handful of other stocks, including movie chain AMC and smartphone company BlackBerry, costing short sellers billions and inspiring the film Dumb Money.
— Roaring Kitty (@TheRoaringKitty) May 13, 2024
Investors interpreted Gill’s social posts as a bullish signal for GameStop’s stock, which rocketed up nearly 200% on Monday. For GameStop itself, the chance to tap capital markets was too sweet to miss out on. And fellow meme stock AMC took advantage of a 78% rise in its share price on Monday by announcing it was selling a new round of shares, diluting the value of existing stock and sending prices plummeting.
Analysts didn’t blame GameStop and AMC for opportunistically taking advantage of the stock jump to raise some extra cash. “You’d be crazy not to sell shares into this ridiculousness if you’re running the company,” Tuttle Capital Management CEO Matthew Tuttle told Bloomberg.
GameStop’s cash grab came right before the company reported preliminary financial results this morning, where it disclosed that first-quarter sales were down almost 20% year over year and it has over $200 million less cash in the bank than it did last spring. Wall Street expected $1 billion in sales, well above the estimated $882 million GameStop reported. The company expects net losses to be between $27 million and $37 million, narrowing from the $50.5 million a year ago, as GameStop has cut operating costs significantly in the past year.
But GameStop’s business has suffered from declining brick-and-mortar sales as more of the market for video-game merchandise moves online. And while losses have improved, analysts don’t expect the bleeding to stop anytime soon.
“We expect them to lose $100 million a year going forward. It’s a race to see if they can close stores fast enough to limit losses, but they have no plan that would suggest they can grow revenue or profit,” wrote Wedbush Securities’ Michael Pachter in a research note.
