GameStop's Roller Coaster Ride Has Started Again

After frenzied trading last month brought GameStop shares from as low as $17 to as high as $483, it eventually stabilized in the $40 to $50 range—until Wednesday, when huge swings resumed. The retailer's share price more than doubled in a sudden burst of trading Wednesday afternoon and closed at nearly $92 after trading was halted twice, the Verge reports. It surged even higher in after-hours trading, only to plunge again when markets opened Thursday, per CNBC. While users of the Reddit r/WallStreetBets forum were again involved in the trading, the fact that the company booted Chief Financial Officer Jim Bell appeared to be the biggest reason for the surge, Fast Company notes.

After hedge funds that had shorted the stock lost hundreds of millions of dollar a few weeks ago, "the prevailing view was that hedge funds wouldn't put themselves into that position again. That they would be all over Reddit and more careful about 'shorting'. Therefore, you wouldn't see a giant spike in the share price again," writes James Clayton for the BBC. "But evidently, that view was wrong. That the share price, in just a few hours, could explode again tests some of the assumptions about what happened last month." The Verge notes that in other developments possibly connected to GameStop's surge, Reddit went down Wednesday, apparently due to heavy traffic, and GameStop board member Ryan Cohen, a possible replacement for Bell, mysteriously tweeted a photo of an ice cream cone with a frog emoji for a caption. (More GameStop stories.)