WWE’s stock price surged on Wednesday thanks to the same Reddit-driven investors who boosted GameStop and AMC stock earlier this year. WWE‘s stock price increased by 11% on Wednesday, closing at $64.48 a share. At one point during trading today, WWE’s stock hit a 52-week high of $70.72 a share. The price increase also came with a major bump in daily trading, with WWE’s share volume (aka, the number of shares traded over the course of a single day) hitting over 5 million shares, which is about 1200% higher than the number of trades typically sold in a day.
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The reason for the price jump has nothing to do with the company’s current performance or rumors of a sale, but rather because of the traders of /r/WallStreetBets, a Reddit community dedicated to the stock market. A post made yesterday pointed out that WWE could be pushed for a big jump in price based on the high number of shorts, solid underlying financials, and cheap stock options. The post, which received over 1,000 upvotes, called WWE’s stock a “low risk, high reward” purchase.
Although WWE didn’t see the skyrocketing in price that GameStop and AMC did, today’s stock price bounce demonstrates the continued force that /r/WallStreetBets is on Wall Street. Earlier this year, the Reddit community started a grassroots campaign that saw GameStop and AMC’s price surge as a concerted pushback against hedge funds who regularly short stock prices (in essence, making bets on a company’s continued poor performance) and place negative pressure on those companies. Both AMC and GameStop’s stock prices remain elevated as a result of the sales push even after the furor around Reddit’s sales flurry faded.
There is a little bit of extra irony in WWE’s Reddit-related surge, as one of the company’s current wrestlers uses various /r/WallStreetBets memes as catchphrases. Cameron Grimes recently adopted the persona of a Reddit-poster turned millionaire to great success. Grimes (who reportedly made legitimate money through the purchase and sales of GameStop stock) is currently in a feud with Ted DiBiase, one of the WWE’s original well-heeled wrestlers.
