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by bsanr2 1949 days ago
Weekly moves. GME, VW, and the one I'm talking about are all comparable in that sense.
1 comments

No, you’re wrong even in this narrow sense. GME had a weekly move from $61 to $483, or 8x. $VW went $201 to $1005 (actually split over two trading weeks, in a single trading week it was $324 to $1005). So between 3 and 5x. The weed stocks are even less.

But the thing is what makes GME an especially big risk is not any weekly move, it is the repeated weekly moves. It is the 100x growth in a stock that has essentially no chance of justifying its valuation. This was not the case with your other examples.

A great deal of GME's move before last month was fighting back against a short attack that had artificially pushed the price down. $5 was not the natural price. $5 was the price as hedge funds attempted to drive Gamestop out of business, in the midst of the COVID crash. I would accept $20, which was what the stock price climbed to before a positive earnings report and moves to restructure increased positive sentiment. The squeeze we saw was, then, 10x at best. This is in line with the 12x I mentioned earlier. VW was less, but had started at a higher point and moved similarly to GME over several months before the major event.

The 28th WAS that event for GME, but it was cut off. It's impossible to say how the differing circumstances between GME and VW's squeeze would have changed the magnitude of its peak, but they're similar enough that we could expect similar movement from $300-$400 to the actual peak if major retail brokerages hadn't prevented traders from opening positions. Go look at a chart of those two weeks. GME's looks similar to VW's, except there's a massive hole on the 28th. When buying resumed (however limited) the price shot back up to match sentiment, above $300, and then mirrored the trend over the following days. That hole is where the squeeze would have been.

Finally, the valuation during action like this is not based on the company's fundamentals but on the magnitude of the bets placed against it. Shorts piled on at extremely low price levels; the more the market decided they were wrong, the more they lost, theoretically without limit.