By Svea Herbst-Bayliss
BOSTON (Reuters) – Investor Andrew Left, who has built a reputation by targeting companies he thinks are over-valued, is as convinced as ever that video retailer GameStop is a dying business whose stock price will fall sharply, some day.
“If I had never been involved in GameStop and came to this right now, would I still be short this stock? 100 percent,” Left, who runs Citron Research and a hedge fund, told Reuters on Tuesday. “This is an old school, failing mall-based video retailer and investors can’t change the perception of that.”
Gamestop did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Shares of videogame retailer GameStop GME.N jumped 22% on Tuesday after surging 144% a day earlier, as individual investors again piled into a number of niche stocks, prompting short sellers to scramble to cover losing bets.
Left shorted the company’s stock when it traded around $40 a share and forecast publicly that it would tumble to $20 a share. He said on Tuesday that he is still short the stock.
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; editing by Megan Davies and Chizu Nomiyama)