NEW YORK (Reuters) – More than a year after retail investors, aided by social media, forced an epic squeeze of a handful of heavily shorted stocks, a few of the infamous “meme” stocks were back in the fast lane this week.
GameStop Corp shares were up 12.9% in the last half hour of trade on Wednesday and AMC Entertainment Holdings surged 14.4%.
While GameStop shares were boosted by Chairman Ryan Cohen’s disclosure that his investment company bought 100,000 shares of the video game retailer, the increase extends the 30% rally on Tuesday, which had no apparent catalyst.
GameStop and AMC were the top two most trending stocks on the retail investor-focused stocktwits.com on Wednesday.
Other companies associated with the trend, also referred to as “stonks” on social media, like Blackberry, Koss Corp and Sundial Growers, were all up between 1.4% and 4.2%.
Netherlands-based electric vehicle charging company Allego NV joined the fray, skyrocketing as much as 133.2%.
On Tuesday, short sellers in Tesla Inc , GameStop and AMC lost $2.32 billion, according to S3 Partners.
(Reporting by Stephen Culp; Editing by Alden Bentley, Bernard Orr)