Nearly 900,000 individual accounts traded shares of GameStop in a single day after a 90-fold increase at the height of the “meme stock” craze, according to a report by the US securities regulator.
GameStop, a struggling video games retailer, became an emblem of the mania that gripped markets in January when its shares surged by 2,700 per cent in less than three weeks. Individual traders organised on online message boards and collectively unleashed furious rallies in certain stocks.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission studied the events and on Monday released a report that offered a first glimpse into the true scale of the phenomenon. For GameStop, the number of individual accounts trading its shares rose from about 10,000 a day at the start of the year to nearly 900,000 at the peak on January 27.