GameStop has now run the same play twice in three weeks — shorts build, CEO buys publicly, bears cover — and the stock is up 12% on the week to $24.03 as a result.
The insider story is the most newsworthy thread here, and it has grown louder. Ryan Cohen made two separate open-market purchases in September: $20.4 million on September 10 and $26.4 million on September 21, bringing his 90-day net buying to roughly $48 million across the board. He filed a Schedule 13D/A on September 21 lifting his disclosed stake to 8.7% of shares outstanding — the latest in a series of seven activist filings since April 2025. Director Alain Attal added to his own position on both September 10 and September 21, and Director Lawrence Cheng put in $1 million on September 8. None of these purchases were made under 10b5-1 pre-arranged plans. That is a cluster of discretionary insider buying, at progressively higher prices, with the CEO as the anchor.
The effect on the short book was rapid and total. Short interest peaked at 33.2 million shares — 7.2% of the free float — on September 21, the same day Cohen's filing went public. By September 22 it had collapsed to just over one million shares, 0.22% of float. That is a 97% drawdown in a single session, the second time in three weeks the same pattern has played out. The borrow market now reflects a completely different stock: availability is loose at 246%, cost to borrow has eased to 0.43%, and the ORTEX short score dropped from 58 on September 21 to 37.7 on September 22 — confirming that short-side pressure has largely dissipated. With only $8 in short interest as a percentage of float remaining, there is no meaningful squeeze dynamic left to discuss.
Options traders have pushed sentiment to its most bullish level of the year. The put/call ratio reached 0.2427 — nearly two standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.267, and sitting just above the 52-week low of 0.2399 set on September 21. Calls are dominating the options market at an extreme that was not present even during GME's earlier 2026 rally phases. That is consistent with the previous trader note from September 19, which flagged bullish options momentum building after the Q2 earnings beat. The reading has moved further in the same direction since.
The fundamental picture remains the same tension it has been for months. Gross margins expanded to 34.5%, collectibles revenue grew 54.6% year over year, and the $1.5 billion convertible offering provides a substantial liquidity buffer. Against that, hardware sales fell 31.7% and software fell 26.7%, and the company has no active Wall Street coverage offering a bull-side price target — the only analyst on record is Wedbush's Michael Pachter, whose last published target of $13.50 is now deeply stale (the most recent action was June 2025) and sits at less than 60% of the current price. The activation data is not reflecting a fundamental re-rating; it is reflecting Cohen's capital and retail momentum.
The next earnings print is scheduled for December 8. Between now and then, the dynamic worth watching is whether bears attempt a third rebuild — and if so, whether Cohen files again within days.
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