GME: Cohen Buys $20M, Bears Exit — Stock Finds New Floor

GameStop enters the post-earnings period in genuinely unfamiliar territory: the short book has all but vanished, the CEO just made the largest open-market insider purchase in recent memory, and the stock is holding near $21 without any squeeze mechanics to prop it up.

The insider story is the week's defining event. Ryan Cohen, President, CEO and Chairman, bought one million shares at $20.38 on September 10 — a $20.4 million open-market purchase, executed without a 10b5-1 plan. That is a discretionary bet, not a scheduled compensation transaction. Director Alain Attal added 5,000 shares the same day, also discretionary. Director Lawrence Cheng had already put $1 million into the stock on September 8 at $18.80. In total, insiders net-bought over $21.3 million worth of GME in the 90-day window, all concentrated in the past two weeks. Cohen already held 7.6% of shares outstanding as of September 3, and his activist Schedule 13D filing — last updated September 10 to reflect 8.5% ownership — confirms the position is growing, not stable. As always with 13D/G disclosures, stakes are as-last-disclosed around the 5% threshold and positions can change without immediate notice, but the direction here is unambiguous.

The positioning picture has flipped almost completely. Short interest has collapsed from 61 million shares in August — roughly 15% of the free float — to 4.5 million shares, or just 1.1% of float, as of September 10. That is a 93% reduction in one week. Borrow availability, which had tightened to below 44% at the most crowded point in early September, has now loosened to 214% — meaning there are more than two shares available to lend for every share currently borrowed. Cost to borrow has fallen to 0.53%, its lowest level in the 30-day window. The ORTEX short score dropped from 80.8 on September 2 to 40.8 on September 10, moving from the upper end of bearish positioning to the midpoint of the range in eight trading sessions. The lending market is now effectively open — any investor who wants to initiate a short position faces almost no friction doing so. Options traders are equally relaxed: the put/call ratio of 0.27 is near its 52-week low of 0.24, and nearly one standard deviation below its 20-day average. Call exposure dominates the options book.

The Street's formal view on GME has not changed — and that data is now stale, with the most recent analyst action from Wedbush's Michael Pachter dating to June 2025, over a year ago. Pachter's Underperform rating with a $13.50 target is the only active coverage in the dataset. At $21.15, the stock trades 57% above that target, which underscores how little Wall Street research is driving price discovery here. The bull case rests on the collectibles segment, where revenue grew 54.6% year-over-year, and on the $1.5 billion convertible note raise that provides a liquidity cushion. Bears point to hardware sales down 31.7% and software down 26.7% — structural declines in the core business that no amount of balance sheet management fully offsets. The factor score picture is consistent with a stock that has few natural institutional buyers: the short score rank sits at the 7th percentile of its universe (very low short pressure now), days-to-cover ranks 4th percentile, and the dividend score of 29 reflects no active dividend. The valuation multiples in the dataset carry dates from 2022 and are not usable for current analysis.

BlackRock added 864,000 shares through August, bringing its stake to 7.3% of shares outstanding. Dimensional Fund Advisors added nearly 3 million shares, a notable build. State Street added 406,000 shares. These are index and quantitative flows rather than active conviction, but the collective direction — institutions adding, not trimming — is consistent with the broader post-earnings stabilisation narrative. Among the correlated peer group, BRLT gained 7.6% on the week while MNRO added 1.5%, suggesting some selective consumer and retail names found buyers. SPWH fell 4.8%, reflecting the patchwork nature of this week's retail tape.

What to watch next: the next earnings event is flagged for December 8, which gives roughly 12 weeks for the market to form a view on whether the Q2 beat — the one that triggered the short exodus — represents a genuine inflection or a one-quarter anomaly. Cohen's continued buying and the near-complete absence of a short book mean the stock's next directional move is likely to be driven by fundamental newsflow rather than positioning mechanics.