January 2021 GME Sneeze, also known as the "GME Short Squeeze"

• In January 2021, the share price of GME was rising exponentially due mainly to the momentum of investor enthusiasm
• On the morning of January 28, 2021, in an unprecedented maneuver, approximately 178 financial institutions, in unison, placed GME in "sell-only", disabling the ability for investors to purchase shares of GME, reducing upward price momentum almost entirely.

• In the years preceding 2021, GameStop was a struggling company that was often viewed as likely heading towards bankruptcy
• Keith Gill, known on YouTube as RoaringKitty, and on Reddit as DeepFuckingValue, began investing in GME in 2019, and shared his investing thesis and position on these social media platforms
• In the second half of 2020, Ryan Cohen began purchasing shares of GME, becoming the largest owner of GME with approximately 13% ownership of the company at the time
• As the share price of GME began rising in the second half of 2020, GME started to gain attention on social media platforms, causing more investors to purchase shares of GME, causing the price to continue to go up, in a continuous feedback loop
• In January 2021, the share price of GME was rising exponentially
• On January 28, 2021, in an unprecedented maneuver, most stock brokers, in unison, disabled the ability for investors to purchase shares of GME
• Information from the SEC Staff Report on Equity and Options Market Structure Conditions in Early 2021 corroborates the idea that what happened was not definitively a short squeeze.
  • "... it was the positive sentiment, not the buying-to-cover, that sustained the weeks-long price appreciation of GameStop stock."
  • "While a short squeeze did not appear to be the main driver of events, and a gamma squeeze less likely, the episode highlights the role and potential impact of short selling and short covering."
• In June 2022, the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services published the report Game Stopped: How the Meme Stock Market Event Exposed Troubling Business Practices, Inadqueate Risk Management, and the Need for Legislative and Regulatory Reform
  • As a multitude of financial institutions faced untenable risk, "several stock trading platforms restricted trading on meme stocks as an emergency risk management tactic"
  • "These restrictions and outages placed downward pressure on meme stocks."
• In September 2023, the movie Dumb Money was released, providing a dramatized story of this peculiar stock market event

Were the events of January 2021 a genuine short squeeze, or something different?