“To the moon” is one of the mottos for the self-proclaimed apes that are dead set on raising the share price for movie theater chain AMC Entertainment. This week alone saw a 95% increase at a whopping $62.55 per share, giving small investors that bought in when the shares were less than $10 a pleasant reward on Wednesday.
The “meme” stock, which has been categorized with the likes of GameStop, BlackBerry, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Koss, has seen a great deal of volatility since the beginning of 2021, when the stock notably jumped 277.61% at $19.90 on January 27 before falling back into the single digits. Around this time last year, the stock was priced at $5.38 per share.
Currently, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. has a market cap of $25.71 billion, indicating that the stock is overvalued and not solely based on functionality (despite more states opening, films returning to AMC theaters, and AMC CEO Adam Aron raising enough capital to acquire theater leases, such as Pacific Theaters and Arclight, while offering investors free popcorn), but moreso on the enthusiasm of retail investors.
It’s a major victory for the apes — a group representing “the people” with varying degrees of trading experience that have bonded over social media and being a thorn in the short seller’s side. Short position investors suffered a $5.2 billion loss this year.
While conventional media attempts to infuse fear into the diamond holding apes with provocative thoughts of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) involvement and cautionary tales of lost fortunes, the “true” apes don’t seem to be fazed at all. The apes with “paper hands” however are another story.
After suffering a downward slide, Thursday closed at $51.34, a decrease of 18 percent that followed an announcement that AMC would be selling over 11 million shares, along with a warning note for investors.
“Our current market prices reflect market and trading dynamics unrelated to our underlying business,” the statement from AMC said.
