By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing -- Another week but it was business as usual for meme stocks as the likes of AMC (NYSE:AMC), GameStop (NYSE:GME) and BlackBerry (NYSE:BB) were up again in premarket Tuesday.
AMC, the latest top draw for the Reddit crowd after replacing GameStop in the league, was up 8%. Blackberry (TSX:BB), a relatively new entrant, was up 7% while the video games retailer was up 3%.
In the case of AMC, there was some news too. The theatre chain said it has raised $230.5 million from sale of 8.5 million Class A Common stock at approximately $27.12 per share.
This is AMC’s second big fund raise in less than three weeks. It had then raised $428 million via sale of 43 million shares at $9.94 apiece. Since the May 13 announcement, the shares have trebled below closing a trifle lower Friday.
The story mostly began in January, when some Reddit followers decided to take on the big hedge funds who were short on GameStop. That unexpected coming together of widely distributed retail investors resulted in a short squeeze in the stock and created trouble for the institutional traders. One even went under.
Since then, the battle between the big institutional guys and the small retail traders, large number of whom are on Robinhood, has waged on.
There was a lull in between but last few weeks have brought back the invisible fight between the small, mostly young, retail traders and the big boys.
In the process, all doomsday projections of small investors burning themselves have come to naught as meme stocks stay at elevated levels.