AMC Stock's Whopping Surge On Thursday Adds Another $634M To Short-Seller Losses

Movie theatre chain AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.’s AMC stock surge of more than 35% on Thursday has cost short sellers another $634 million in losses, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners.

What Happened: The meme stock’s rally on Thursday amid a boost from retail investors took losses of short sellers — those betting for declines in the company’s shares — to just below $2 billion for the year, according to the report.

Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of predictive analytics at S3, was quoted by the report as saying that the pain could get even worse for the short sellers.

See also: How to Buy AMC Stock

AMC Entertainment and another retail investor favorite GameStop Corp. GME rank high on S3 Partners’ “Squeeze Score metric” with both scoring 10 out of 10, the report noted.

AMC Entertainment’s shares rose for a fourth straight day on Thursday, rising to their highest level since May 2017 and pushing the company’s market capitalization higher to $11.94 billion. The stock has gained 120% so far this week.

See Also: GameStop, AMC Short Seller Losses For 2021 Widen To $8B

Why It Matters: Meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment and GameStop that were the focus of retail investors on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum earlier this year are seeing renewed retail investor interest with the Reddit traders attempting to push the stocks higher and force short sellers to buy these stocks to cover their positions. Both the stocks are currently trending across popular social media platforms.

AMC Entertainment’s stock has returned year-to-date gains of 822.64%, while GameStop stock’s year-to-date returns stand at 1,187.47%.

Price Action: AMC Entertainment shares rose 35.6% in the regular trading session on Thursday to $26.52, but edged down less than 0.1% in the after-hours session to $26.51.

Read Next: Those Still Shorting Gamestop, AMC Are 'Out Of Their Mind,' Says Cramer