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by bsanr2 1948 days ago
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.