The Reddit army is getting ready. Is BBBY the next GME?

August 17, 7:21 am

Update Aug 22
It turns out the Reddit army wasn't ready at all and folded the second the news broke that Ryan Cohen had exited his position...

Things were fairly quiet in the weeks leading up to the big squeeze. Sure, there were a couple of users on Reddit discussing the irrational logic behind the posts from a user named DeepFuckingValue. But at most, mentions for GME were hovering around 20 per day, which was nothing remarkable at the time. However, as more users started to listen to DFV, an opportunity emerged to squeeze a couple of greedy hedge funds. As the short squeeze began to take shape., more people realized that this was their time as the price boomed to $40 a share.

In the last days of January 2020, growingly more people flocked to wallstreetbets and started discussing the phenomenon. As the stock price exploded, so did the chatter. “To the moon” and “I like the stock” became mainstream phrases as the hyped-up community mentioned GME thousands of times on Reddit, Twitter, and the news. After getting beat by the system for years, this was the little guy's chance to fight back.

At its maximum hype, the word "GME" got mentioned over a million times on Reddit, Twitter, Stocktwits, and in the news. DFV became a legend with over $19 million in gains. The traction GME received back was historical, and right now, it looks like history is repeating itself.

Is BBBY following the trajectory of GME in 2020?

Over the last couple of days, another heavily shorted company is repeating a similar trend. It started with a tweet by Ryan Cohen, currently chairman of GME. It slowly echoed to the retail investors who remember when trading of GME was shut down and are still holding a grudge since that day. They remember the community, the gains and the unfair system. Some retail investors now anticipate a repeat of GME's meme darling storyline, without the shutdown this time.

BBBY has 50.7% of its open stock float in short positions currently. Elevated levels of short positions expose risk to a potential short squeeze. With retail investors continuing to drive up the highly shorted stock’s price, they are forcing bearish investors to buy back the share at higher prices. They want to minimize their losses, which could potentially cause a squeeze.

BBBY is now gaining traction similar to GME on Reddit and other social media forums. From being mentioned around 20 times per day on Reddit, BBBY is now mentioned over 10,000 times per day on just Reddit. Mainstream is starting to catch up as BBBY is now also being mentioned more often in the news, on Twitter and on other social media platforms.

Screenshot of BBBY on Google Finance

What can we expect?

The results? The price of BBBY went up from $6 at the beginning of August to $20 at closing yesterday. This is a massive increase in just a couple of days, but GME, at its peak, saw a price increase of 2000%. BBBY has momentum with a 300% increase in price already as its social media mentions heat up. With a Reddit army now in full force, not accepting defeat this time, there’s no way of knowing where this will take us.

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