Sometimes, you just gotta stop hatin’ and celebrate the classics.
Retail investors poured into OG meme stocks on Wednesday, as GameStop GME, +4.69%, AMC Entertainment AMC, +2.96% and BlackBerry BB, +5.03% all posted gains while Robinhood HOOD, -0.02% tried to bro-out with the meme-stock crowd but instead posted something off a “dad tweet,” infuriating many traders on social media who are already distrustful of the zero-commission trading app.
Things were primed for AMC on Wednesday morning as the hashtag #AMCSqueeze continued to trend on Twitter and the theater chain’s meme-friendly CEO Adam Aron waxed poetic on the social-media app about Marvel’s upcoming superhero blockbuster “Eternals.”
Optimism on AMC stock was further fueled by speculation that hedge funds that are naked shorting the stock will have to cover in the coming week or two, leading to a possible gain of 30% or greater.
That theory spilled over into trading on GameStop and BlackBerry, which both closed up around 5% as retail investors openly crowed about both tickers. Mentions of BlackBerry — which also announced some new software deals Wednesday — popped over 1,000% according to data from HypeEquity.
While GameStop’s Stans were a prime driver of the day’s move, a big moment for the stock came in response to Robinhood’s aspiringly cool tweet.
At 1:51 p.m., Robinhood’s Twitter account tried to capitalize on the new “red flag” meme by tweeting “Investing isn’t for everyone,” adding the red flag emojis meant to denote toxic opinions.
The tweet did not land with much of its target audience, as many pro-retail voices teed off on Robinhood, mentioning its recent legal controversies and generally mocking the attempt at solidarity with the Reddit Raiders movement.
In the end, the tweet brought to mind a different meme:
A similar tweet apparently did land for GameStop, though, which deployed the meme to much more popular effect:
“1v1” is a popular phrase among gamers meant as a challenge to do battle. GameStop was trading near its intraday high when the tweet landed.
But it wasn’t all sunshine in MemeVille.
Headphone-maker Koss Corporation KOSS, -2.76% fell back after Tuesday’s manic ultra-late rally to close down almost 3% on the day, falling almost 5% after noon, but still locking in some gains from speculation that it will prevail in its patent lawsuit with Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.42%.
Another meme ticker that had a rough day was DatChat Inc. DATS, -26.72%, which fell almost 27% on Wednesday. The stock had soared more than 100% on social-media speculation that the company would complete a deal with Barstool Sports, but while many speculated that the deal would be an acquisition, it turned out that DatChat will pay Barstool “a low seven-figure fee” to “launch a multi-channel, national marketing campaign” across Barstool properties.
But like a kid scraping an Italian ice, the best part of Wednesday for many meme traders came at the end when a sketchy report surfaced on Twitter that the SEC’s current investigation into retail-investor archenemy Citadel was motivated by political animus towards the firm’s founder, Ken Griffin.
We’ll surely talk more about that on Thursday.