AMC Jumps 19% as Funds Eye Bearish Bets

Market participants have told Reuters that some Wall Street institutional investors are ramping up complex options trades that let them bet the shares will fall while keeping a lid on potential losses if they instead gain.

Cinema operator AMC Entertainment Holdings, which almost doubled in value again last week, rose 18.5%, while Microvision, a developer of laser beam scanning technology, climbed 7.1%.

Data shows AMC has been the top traded stock among clients of brokerages Fidelity and Freetrade, used heavily by amateur and individual investors playing with their own money.

On trading-focused social media site Stocktwits, message volume related to AMC – a barometer of interest in the stock – rose 3.3% on Monday.

Among other meme stocks, BlackBerry’s U.S. listing was up 8.6% and videogame retailer GameStop Corp and headphones maker KOSS rose 6.6% and 12.1%, respectively.

(Reporting by Aaron Saldanha in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)