“Damn this volume is so low,” one Reddit person moaned Monday morning, analyzing perceived quiet premarket motion and concluding that “people waiting for earnings to buy in.”

That sentiment was echoed by one other person as GameStop tumbled greater than 5% in early buying and selling, writing that “200 is the new $40. Buy up before we move to $500.”

Tuesday might be GameStop’s first official assertion on its monetary image since January’s manic rally despatched the replenish greater than 1,641% in a matter of days as a horde of traders used social-media platforms like Discord and Reddit and no-fee apps like Robinhood to ship GameStop shares to the moon.

That rally got here regardless of GameStop’s outcomes for the third quarter of 2020. In December, the firm disclosed that gross sales had been down greater than $1 billion on a year-over-year foundation, a 30.2% plunge, creating big brief curiosity in the inventory and giving extra energy to activist investor Ryan Cohen, who has publicly shared his opinion that GameStop’s gross sales mannequin is antiquated and must be up to date pronto, with a shift to digital gross sales.

For mainstream watchers of GameStop inventory, expectations stay low, however Tuesday does current the first alternative for Cohen to articulate his imaginative and prescient. Cohen, the Chewy Inc.
CHWY,
+4.06%
 co-founder, turned a member of GameStop’s board of administrators at the begin of 2021, and up to now his communications have been restricted to social-media memes, together with this one the place he tweeted the picture of a McDonald’s ice cream cone:

And this one, riffing off the buddy-comedy flick “Dumb and Dumber”:

“Whether they beat estimates or not is a moot point,” stated Thomas H. Kee Jr., founding father of Stock Traders Daily. “If they fail to make some sort of announcement, it will be terrible for the stock.”

GameStop is anticipated to report earnings per share of $1.35, or $88 million, on $2.211 billion in income for the fourth quarter, in response to the consensus estimates of six analysts surveyed by FactSet. Those estimates have been steadily falling from October, when consensus estimates foresaw EPS of $1.80 on income of $2.52 billion in the fourth quarter.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that it’s not possible for GameStop’s outcomes to mirror its roughly $14 billion valuation.

“There is not an institutional investor alive who is considering going long [on the stock at] at $200,” Pachter stated. “This is not a dot-com that’s just starting up.” Indeed, GameStop was based in 1984 in Dallas underneath the identify Babbage’s Etc.

In any case, GameStop’s Reddit military isn’t refined about its disdain for flinty-eyed Wall Street analysts.

“Got to love all these guys saying it’s over and to sell,” wrote one person at noon Monday, sarcastically including, ”I’m positive you had been the similar guys who predicted the first two spikes?”

“It’s fine if we dip a bit today,” mused one other person. “Just makes things juicy for the earnings/conference call run up.”

For Kee, a former longtime MarketWatch contributing columnist, there may be a method for GameStop to shock the market: “Unless they pivot to a digital model, they will collapse and fail,” he stated. “There’s no way they justify the stock price, but they could maybe come close if they announce some huge event like a pivot to digital.” 

Regardless of what GameStop experiences on Tuesday, the firm has set a brand new bar for watching its fairness worth transfer with parabolic volatility between earnings calls, a market phenomenon greatest summarized by one other WallStreetBets person on Monday.

“I’ve learned 99% of what I know about the stock market based on GME,” the person wrote. “Which means after GME I will need to relearn everything again because this doesn’t seem like a normal situation to me.”