The only thing people did more than see the new “Spider-Man” movie on Thursday and Friday was get a positive COVID test result, but retail investors remained focused on the former and will worry about the latter next week. .. evidently.
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,
rose more than 19% Friday as the theater chain’s loyal army of social media “Monkeys” piled up in trading, pushing the price briefly above $30 a share for the first time in more than two weeks.
And like many peaks in AMC in 2021, Friday’s move was prompted in part by a tweet from the company’s CEO, Adam Aron.
Those numbers are even more “staggering” given 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 that could hit a week before Christmas hits.
On Reddit, the vibe was…different.
“Apes something is happening,” was the title of a popular Friday morning post on subreddit r/AMCStock. “Dow down almost 600 and we’re skyrocketing.”
“I call it ‘The Spidey Effect,’ aka ‘The Peter Tingle,'” commented a fellow monkey.
Still, other monkeys hadn’t calmed down yet.
“This is not a MOASS,” warned one user. “This is a teenie, weenie spike. GAAP. Don’t get excited until it has increased at least 10,000%.”
But that can be difficult, at least in the short term.
At a White House briefing on Thursday, President Joe Biden warned that omicron “is here now and it is spreading and it will increase.”
He went on to predict that unvaccinated Americans will face a “winter of serious illness and death.”
A spread like March 2020, even with many unvaccinated Americans potentially reducing hospitalizations, will cause a contraction in AMC’s bottom line. That’s not AMC’s fault or a prediction that it won’t bounce back after the wave crests, but it’s a very likely outcome.
And there’s also a hard case to make that AMC is currently compressible. According to Ortex, short-term yields on AMC were flat on Friday, holding steady at just over 20% of the full float.
Interestingly enough, Fidelity’s buy-to-sell ratio on the day was essentially flat, giving a sense that some paper monkeys may have cashed in on the variant in view. And we are unaware that about 30% of the many open options trades on AMC – and options make up a large part of AMC – expired at Friday’s closing bell.
Ryan Cohen’s Poo Tweet Doesn’t Affect a Strong Day for GameStop
Let’s face it: GameStop GME,
drove AMC’s coattails on Friday as meme stocks — and especially these two — tried to move together recently, with a population of 7.6%.
What did surprise us, however, was that private investors seemed unresponsive to a tweet from GameStop chairman/social media guru Ryan Cohen.
And that was especially true given the nuanced content of the tweet:
Despite that DD, GameStop shares actually fell 0.3% after Cohen’s layered communiqué.
dr. Susanne Trimbath Returns to MemeMarkets and “Queen Silverback” Has Some Thoughts to Share on Market Structure in 2022
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