By Aaron Saldanha and Sin’ad Carew
(Reuters) -Shares of AMC Entertainment hit record highs before paring gains on Friday, putting the movie theater chain on track for a 156% weekly gain.
AMC’s shares were last up 16.4% at $30.87 after earlier hitting a high of $36.72, and on track for their biggest weekly gains since late January.
Shares in GameStop were down 2.4% on Friday. Shares of the videogame retailer, which has been at the heart of the so-called “stonks” retail trading mania this year, were still set for its best weekly gain since mid-March, up about 40% so far.
Retail traders’ shift into so-called meme stocks – shares favored by the denizens of online communities – comes on the back of a selloff in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies whose prices have slumped in recent weeks.
AMC saw some $127 mln in inflows from retail investors on Thursday, according to Vanda Research. AMC rose 35.5% in that session adding more than $3.3 billion to its market value, according to data from Refinitiv.
Data shows the cinema operator AMC has been the most traded stock on brokerage Robinhood’s popular trading app, as well as on that of UK-based Freetrade, where buy orders have outnumbered sell orders two-to-one.
Investors shorting meme stocks GameStop, AMC and private spaceship company Virgin Galactic are estimated to have lost $2.8 billion so far this week, data from financial analytics firm Ortex shows. They lost $1 billion on Thursday alone.
On trading-focused social media site Stocktwits (ST), message volume related to AMC spiked by nearly 40%, with more than 97% of messages reflecting positive sentiment towards the stock.
“AMC – why sell now when u can sell later for much more, ya (k)now?,” user lilant135 wrote, while fellow retail trader BossNoHugo chimed in, “imagine selling because a stranger on ST told u to do so.”
(Additional reporting by Sin’ad Carew in New York, Sujata Rao in London; Writing by Thyagaraju Adinarayan; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Nick Zieminski)
