Courtesy of Pam Martens
When it comes to the shares of GameStop, most of the mainstream media’s focus has been on the Reddit message board commentators who stood to make millions of dollars from boosting the stock price. It’s a good bet that the SEC, FBI, Financial Stability Oversight Council, Senate and House investigators are setting their sights on those who stood to make…not millions but billions. The overarching question will be: did any of the big players engage in a direct role on Reddit or incentivize the people posting on the Reddit message board, WallStreetBets, to hawk the shares of GameStop.
It’s very clear from the volume of trading in GameStop that amateur traders are not the major movers of this stock. The stock has gone from trading less than 13 million shares a day in November to over 150 million shares per day on multiple days last week.
This is looking more like a vicious war between rich guys who held big stakes in GameStop versus a handful of hedge funds that were massively short the stock. (To short a stock means to bet the share price will fall.)
Aside from the hedge funds like Melvin Capital that has lost billions of dollars on its short bet, another big loser in the tug of war appears to be a South Korean group that was long the stock (owned it) but sold way ahead of the big jump in share price. According to a filing with the SEC dated January 27, 2021, for the period ending December 31, 2020, the South Korean MUST Asset Management had dumped all of the 3.3 million shares it owned by the end of last year. Ownership of those shares had been acknowledged to the SEC in a filing on March 20, 2020. We do not know at present exactly when in 2020 MUST Asset Management sold their shares. GameStop traded below $25 a share throughout 2020. GameStop closed at $325 last Friday.
Kurt Wolf’s Hestia Capital Partners and Hestia Capital Management dumped 810,000 shares of GameStop on January 12-13, 2021 at prices ranging between $19.99 and $31.08. That’s a far cry from where GameStop was trading intraday on Friday, reaching a high of $413.98 before closing at $325.00. Based on the data provided to the SEC, Hestia sold off approximately $17.19 million. That would leave Hestia with 1,180,000 shares, which had a market value of $383.5 million as of Friday’s close.
Ryan Cohen’s RC Ventures increased its position in GameStop to 9,001,000 shares on January 10, 2021 according to its filing with the SEC, representing 12.9 percent of the company’s outstanding stock. That was an increase of 2.5 million shares from RC Ventures’ position in GameStop as of September 21, 2020. If Cohen’s firm still held its position as of last Friday’s close, it had a value of $2.9 billion.
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