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GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen — a vocal Donald Trump supporter — is celebrating the former president’s upcoming return to the Oval Office as the value of his company’s shares climb on the stock market.
At the close of trading on Monday, GameStop was up approximately 9.6 percent to $27.26 a share. The company also saw four days of growth, making it the company’s longest upward run since July 16, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Since Trump’s election, more than 15.7 million shares of GameStop were traded, almost doubling the average volume of 8.2 million.
GameStop became one of the most popular shares available during the pandemic, along with other “meme stocks” such as AMC and Blackberry. In 2021 users of Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum generated huge hype around the stock, which at the time was being heavily shorted by hedge funds. The interest surrounding GameStop caused its price to jump to a record closing price of $86.88 on January 27, 2021.
Cohen expressed his excitement over Trump’s return on X on Wednesday, writing “God bless America!” in a post.
He endorsed Trump on July 13, just after the former president survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Since then, he’s been vocal on social media, making clear he was in the bag for the former and now soon-to-be president. One of his posts was simply Trump’s name, over and over.
He wasn’t the only one singing Trump’s praise; Jeremy Siegel, finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania also heaped praise on the president-elect, calling him the most “pro-stock market” president in US history.
“President-elect Trump is the most pro-stock market president we have had in our history,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box. “He measured his success in his first term by how well the stock market did. You know, it seems to me very unlikely he’s going to implement policies that are going to be bad for the stock market.”
Chief among those polices was Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts, which saw a historic transfer of weather from the middle class to the wealthiest Americans.
Siegel praised the cuts, but said further proposed tax cuts would likely be difficult for Trump to achieve.
“I think the extension of his 2017 tax cuts, looks pretty much like a slam dunk, but the expansion to all his other tax cuts is certainly going to be much more difficult,” he told CNBC. Just as in 2016, the market rallied after Trump’s election. On Friday, the Dow closed up 259.65 points, the S&P 500 index finished up 22.44 points, and the Nasdaq ended up 17.32 percent.
