Who doesn’t wish they hadn’t tucked away a few GameStop shares at the beginning of this year? It’s not a great company – more a Blockbuster Video whose time has come and gone, another bricks and mortar retailer destroyed by a shift to online sales, in this case of video games. But what does that matter when you could have bought at $20 (£14.57) and now have a share worth $197 (£143)? And that is before Wall Street opens on Friday, when the pre-market suggests it may well be up another 150 per cent.
It is mad — yet not mad. The mostly young retail investors pouring into the stock are doing it for a reason: they want to destroy the hedge funds whom they see as among the many bogeymen of global capitalism. Those hedge funds have taken short positions in GameStop — they have borrowed shares and sold them in the hope of buying them back at a lower price and making a killing.
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