GameStop short squeeze

Overall, GME’s intraday share price increased approximately 2,700% from its intraday low on January 8 to its intraday high on January 28, followed by a decrease of over 86% from that day to the closing price at the end of the first week of February.

The increases coincided with a sharp increase in the number of individual accounts actively trading GME.

Media attention on GME increased with the January 11 announcement that Mr. Cohen, of Chewy, would join the GameStop board of directors.

Citadel Securities accounted for nearly 50% of internalizer dollar volume during the month, rising to as high as 55% of daily internalized dollar volume twice.

Then, as the end of January approached, several retail broker-dealers temporarily prohibited certain activity in some of these stocks and options.

For example, Robinhood and Interactive Brokers stated that in some cases, investors would only be able to sell their position in certain securities and not open a new position.

Whether driven by a desire to squeeze short sellers and thus to profit from the resultant rise in price, or by belief in the fundamentals of GameStop, it was the positive sentiment, not the buying-to-cover, that sustained the weeks-long price appreciation of GameStop stock.

I am an individual investor. My investment in GameStop and my posts on social media were entirely my own.

In fact, we had been short GameStop since Melvin’s inception six years earlier

When this frenzy began, Melvin started closing out its position in GameStop at a loss, not because our investment thesis had changed but because something unprecedented was happening.

Included in the portfolio and our optimism for 2021 was a new core holding established in Q4 of 2020, GameStop (“GME”). As has been widely reported in the media, we had tremendous success in January with our GME investment, which we fully crystallized.