"No Comrades Before Money"... US Retail Investors Leading the War, Expelled for Trying to Monopolize Profits

'Ant' Community Behind GameStop War Faces Internal Conflict Over Movie Profits
Questions Raised About Institutional Investors Leading Stock Surge Instead of Individual Investors

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy New York=Correspondent Baek Jong-min] Individual investors in the U.S. who drove up GameStop's stock price and won the short-selling war against hedge funds are now experiencing internal conflicts. Doubts have also been raised that it was not the individual investors who propelled GameStop's stock price.

The New York Times (NYT) reported on the 5th (local time) that conflicts among the administrators of the online community Reddit's 'WallStreetBets' forum, considered the epicenter of the retail investor rebellion, have become serious.

It is analyzed that attempts to produce a movie about the sharp rise in GameStop's stock price have divided them.

According to the NYT, a film production company contacted senior administrators of the WallStreetBets forum to discuss the possibility of making a movie, but these administrators concealed this fact from the other administrators.

In particular, when other administrators later found out and publicly raised issues on the forum, the senior administrators forcibly removed them.

The administrators who were sanctioned claim that this was to secretly monopolize the profits from the movie adaptation.

As posts containing not only insults but also death threats appeared, Reddit, the company operating the online community, intervened. Reddit stripped the senior WallStreetBets administrators of their privileges and handed over management rights to administrators who opposed secretly pushing forward the movie adaptation.

There was also a claim that individual investors might not have been the ones who drove up GameStop's stock price. The trigger was that GameStop was not included in the top 10 stocks most purchased by individual investors in January.

According to JP Morgan, the top 10 stocks invested in by individuals in January were Apple, AMD, Tesla, Plug Power, Facebook, General Motors (GM), Microsoft (MS), Coca-Cola, and Verizon. AMC, which also surged alongside GameStop, was included, but GameStop's name was absent.

The fact that GameStop did not make it into the top 10 individual purchase stocks was an unexpected result, according to analysis from the U.S. securities industry.

Rather, it was suggested that individuals sold more than they bought while GameStop's stock price was soaring. According to Citadel Securities, individual investors were net sellers of GameStop stock for three consecutive days from the 26th to the 28th of last month. GameStop's stock price surged 93% on the 26th and 135% on the 27th, but individual investors took selling positions at that time.

CNBC reported that while GameStop's stock price was skyrocketing, the proportion of individual investors' trading volume actually decreased. The share of individual trading volume, which reached 48% on January 26th, dropped to 42.9% the next day when the stock price soared 135%.

Based on this analysis, CNBC pointed out that institutional investors might have been the main drivers behind GameStop's stock price surge.

Peng Cheng, an analyst at JP Morgan Global, said, "While individual investors' purchases are portrayed as the main driving force behind the extreme price rallies of some stocks, the actual picture may be much more nuanced."

On that day, GameStop's stock price recovered from a plunge and closed at 63.77, up 19.2%.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.