SYDNEY (AFP) — A little-known Australian mining company saw its share price soar as much as 50% on Thursday, after investors appeared to mistake it for the similarly named cult U.S. stock GameStop.
GME Resources Limited — listed as "GME" on the Australian Securities Exchange — surged in early trading, with the market taking an unexpected interest in the tiny Western Australia-based nickel miner.
Trading volume in the company was at more than 20 times the normal average, leading some to believe that GME had been mistaken for GameStop, which has the ticker "GME" on the New York Stock Exchange.
GameStop, a struggling U.S. video game retailer, has seen its stock surge about 1,000 percent in two weeks after a group of amateur investors active on the online forum Reddit banded together to fight the Wall Street funds that had pushed its price lower.
"When I opened my share tracking app and saw it was at 9.4 cents, I was stunned," GME's managing director Peter Sullivan told the Sydney Morning Herald.
"It just went bang, and I thought, 'well, what's going on here'? Is there something about my own company that I don't know?"
The company's management had no idea what was happening until a younger family member explained.
"There were emails and text messages from people flying around, and eventually my brother's son, who works in Sydney, told us it was about speculation to do with the ticker GME."
Close to the end of trade on Thursday, the Australian company was still trading up 19% for the day, beating the country's top listed firms, which were down more than 2%.
© Agence France-Presse
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