‘GameStop: Rise of the Players’: bonkers stock climb could repeat

nypost.com:

Wall Street Bets, the Reddit hub of memes and financial advice responsible for fueling the GME surge was so initially anti-GameStop that early investors like Farris Husseini — an Alabama data visualizer — were banned from posting about the company because it annoyed so many users. “GameStop was hated among gamers, like hated,” Jeff Tarzia, a former video game tester and one of the stock’s few early supporters, says in the documentary.

He admits that the bias was understandable. Notorious for awful customer service and pathetically weak game trade-in values, GameStop was predicted to be the next Blockbuster as the video game industry had been rapidly shifting to online retail before COVID hit.Despite all this, early in the pandemic, a few GameStop true believers scattered across the US managed to find community through nightly livestreams by galvanizing YouTuber and GME investor Keith Gill.

Better known as “Roaring Kitty,” Gill is now widely regarded as the prophet of GameStop’s success.Gill and his followers would hyper-analyze the numbers a few nights a week, but the big level-up came when Ryan Cohen, co-founder of the pet food e-commerce business Chewy, bought big into GME.

He joined the board of directors in the fall of 2020, later becoming chairman.Cohen — who was confident that his old startup Chewy would have succeeded selling any product — was quick to jump on the front line of GME by holding one-on-one Zoom calls with investors.“He literally just peppered me with questions, ‘What do you see in GameStop?'” said investor Justin Dopierala, founder of Wisconsin based DOMO Capital, a firm that manages mostly blue-collar clients.The new head honcho very quickly righted the ship for GameStop.