GameStop Distracts Investors With Shiny New Object... Degens Fall For It (Obviously)
It appears that when GameStop's crack finance team isn't crafting ways to fuck the few customers it has left with low-ball trade-in offers on newly-released video games, it's engaging in a different sort of financial engineering. Yesterday, the mall retailer you can find tucked between a boarded up Rainforest Café and Foot Locker (if you see the Build-A-Bear and food court where dreams go to die, you've gone too far), declared a 4-for-1 stock split.
Investors will get 3 additional shares of GME for every stonk they own at the close on July 18th. The company will begin trading on a stock adjusted basis on July 22nd.
For anyone that's spent any amount of time on WallStreetBets in the past few months, presumably consuming u/mywifesboyfriend69's latest deep dive on a cutting edge high-tech firm out of the Midwest awaiting imminent patent approval, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The crayon eaters have been looking forward to this moment since March when GameStop and its Chairman and Savior, Ryan Cohen, announced their intentions. Last month the investors that made Gabe Plotkin wish he had never left the nest/stopped suckling Steve Cohen's teet voted to increase the number of outstanding shares.
Pretty much every company with a Delaware LLC and retail investor fan base has played this hand. Tesla, Amazon, and Google all recently declared stock splits... and reaffirmed the old adage "stock only go up... after split." Despite the move having literally no impact on the value of the company or the stock (friendly reminder: every share will be worth 1/4 of the current price) GameStonk mooned. Shares jumped 8% on the news.
If nothing else, the get rich quick scheme should distract GameStop investors from management's piss poor showing in the aftermath of meme stock mania. Despite being anointed the Messiah after buying up a sizeable stake in GameStop in 2021 and shaking up leadership, Chairman Ryan Cohen, the founder of Chewy, has met most expectations at best. The only thing he's done more than tweet is fail to deliver on promises to turn GameStop into an e-comm force that would put blood in Amazon's stool. Thus far his only contribution has been launching a crypto wallet no one uses an NFT marketplace without so much as a Bored Ape knockoff.
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Shares are down 15.5% on the year... which is better than most stocks. But without any concrete plans to, you know, actually do anything (besides be the beneficiary of the nearby Auntie Anne's Pretzels' foot traffic), investors might start eyeing a real company with the kinda management team they'll write textbooks about: AMC.
Snap Necks and Cash Checks,
Tyler
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