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The only thing people were doing more on Thursday and Friday than seeing the new “Spider-Man” movie was getting a positive COVID test result, but retail investors stayed focused on the former and will worry about the latter next week…apparently.
In response to a big Thursday dip and some early morning boffo box-office results for “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” stock in AMC Entertainment
AMC,
soared more than 19% on Friday as the theatre chain’s loyal army of social media “Apes” piled into the trade, pushing the price briefly above $30 a share for the first time on over two weeks.
And like many surges in AMC in 2021, Friday’s move was keyed in part by a tweet from the company’s CEO Adam Aron.
Those numbers are even more “staggering” considering that the omicron variant is spreading at an alarming rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 530 points on Friday as investors braced for a tidal wave of COVID cases hitting a week before Christmas.
On Reddit, the vibe was…different.
“Apes something is happening,” was the title of one popular Friday morning post on subreddit r/AMCStock. “Dow down almost 600 and we are rocketing.”
“I call it ‘The Spidey Effect,’ AKA ‘The Peter Tingle,’” responded a fellow Ape.
Still, other Apes were not yet appeased.
“This isn’t MOASS,” cautioned one user. “This is a teenie, weenie spike. Yawn. Don’t get excited, until it raises 10,000% minimum.”
But that might be tough, at least in the short-term.
At a Thursday White House briefing, President Joe Biden warned that omicron is “here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase.”
He went on to predict that unvaccinated Americans are facing a “winter of severe illness and death.”
A spread like March 2020, even with many Americans vaccinated potentially lessening hospitalizations, will put a crimp in AMC’s bottom line. That’s not a fault of AMC’s or a prediction that it won’t rebound after the wave crests, but it is a very likely outcome.
And there’s also a tough case to make that AMC is currently squeezable. According to Ortex, short interest on AMC was flat on Friday, holding steady at just over 20% of the entire float.
Interestingly, Fidelity’s buy-to-sell ratio was essentially flat on the day, giving the sense that some paper-handed Apes might have cashed in with an eye on the variant. And we’re not unaware that roughly 30% of the many open options trades on AMC — -and options are a huge part of AMC — expired at Friday’s closing bell.
Ryan Cohen’s poop tweet has no effect on a strong day for GameStop
Let’s be honest: GameStop
GME,
rode AMC’s coattails on Friday as meme stocks –and especially these two — attempt to move together recently, popping 7.6%.
One thing that did surprise us was that retail investors did not appear to react to a tweet from GameStop chairman/social-media guru supreme, Ryan Cohen.
And that was especially true considering the nuanced content of the tweet:
Despite that DD, GameStop shares were actually down 0.3% after the layered communique from Cohen.
Dr. Susanne Trimbath returns to MemeMarkets, and “Queen Silverback” has some thoughts to share on market structure in 2022
Check it out:
