GameStop pops as traders hope Ryan Cohen is borrowing Saylor’s strategy

A picture can be worth a thousand words. In this case, all of those are “buy.”

There’s always a tweet (behind any GameStop rally), and shares of the operationally challenged video game retailer are up about 3% in premarket trading after GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen posted a photo with Michael Saylor to X.

Saylor runs Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the largest corporate holder of bitcoin. The warm market response to Cohen’s tweet suggests that traders are hoping that Cohen uses some of GameStop’s $4.6 billion in cash and cash-like securities to take a page from Saylor’s playbook. (That playbook has one rule: buy bitcoin).

GameStop and Strategy don’t make money from their actual business operations. Whereas GameStop has been able to generate income by cosplaying as a T-bill fund, Strategy has been at the other end of the risk spectrum, benefiting from the value of the bitcoin it holds on its balance sheet rising by about $14 billion.

GameStop’s foray into the crypto realm was largely ineffectual. In January 2022, news broke that the video game retailer had been staffing up for a non-fungible token (NFT) platform. That was launched in July of that year, effectively top-ticking enthusiasm for ownership of this form of digital art. Ryan Cohen became CEO in September 2023, and this marketplace was closed to trading by early February 2024.

Cohen’s leadership is integral to major shareholder and cheerleader Keith Gill’s bull case for the company.