Moallemi also said some of the brokerage account screenshots - like the ones Gill posted - also fueled the frenzy. "But then this sort of technical phenomenon, which is called a short squeeze, that was really sort the dynamite that was thrown on the kindling." "So it started out as kind of a little bit of a value investing story," he added. "And the act of capitulation is basically to buy back their short position, which will even drive the stock higher." "The reason why that's important is if there's people betting the stock is going to go down, and if they're wrong and the stock price gets pushed up, then what will happen is eventually they will capitulate and they will give up," Moallemi said.
#Hold the line gamestop driver
"The second part of the driver was the observation that there were a number of hedge funds who basically had a bet that GameStop would go to zero."Īs the shares slowly edged up, these short sellers loomed large. "That was part of the driver," Moallemi said of GameStop's stock's meteoric rise. Gill did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment, though he told the Wall Street Journal last week that he "didn't expect this."Ĭiamac Moallemi, a professor at Columbia University's business school, told ABC News that Burry and Cohen fueled a "small" but growing group that "believed the market was discounting GameStop too much, and that there was some underlying value there and that the business could be turned around." Gill and other members of the forum also cited the bullish GameStop stance of Michael Burry, the legendary trader who was portrayed by Christian Bale in the 2015 film "The Big Short," as fuel for their investment choices. Gill also posted screenshots of his GameStop portfolio on r/wallstreetbets as far back as 2019.
In a July 27, 2020, YouTube video posted to his channel, Gill said, "Some people won't even tune into the stream right now when they hear I'm bullish on GameStop, at the current price point it's traded at about four bucks right now."
Gill publicly touted GameStop stock long before it caught the eyes of Wall Street and the world.
Many link the initial push in r/wallstreetbets toward GameStop to an individual investor identified by the Wall Street Journal as Keith Gill, but known on Reddit by his screen name "DeepF***ingValue" or "DFV" for short.