Amateur investors on Wall Street piled further into niche stocks on Tuesday, sending professional short-sellers scrambling to cover losing bets, with GameStop skyrocketing for a fourth straight day, thanks in part to Elon Musk.

As reported by Reuters, GameStop surged 50 percent in extended trade on Wall Street after Musk tweeted "Gamestonk!!", along with a link to Reddit's Wallstreetbets stock trading discussion group, where supporters affectionately refer to the Tesla CEO as "Papa Musk." "Stonks" is a tongue-in-cheek term for stocks widely used on social media.

GameStop is a videogame hardware and software company and was doing badly on the stock exchanges before the pandemic and did disastrously through 2020.

However, the stock has doubled in the last 2 days and has given whopping returns of over 700 percent just in the first month of 2021.

CNBC-TV18’s Prashant Nair explains the story behind the stock’s stellar returns.

Watch the video for more

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)

First Published:Jan 27, 2021 1:37 PM IST