GoPro Shares Make Huge Gains After Becoming Latest Meme Stock
Shares in GoPro have been surging this week thanks to what Wall Street traders call a “meme stock.”
GoPro, along with Krispy Kreme and Beyond Meat, have been surging — all three companies are part of the meme stock revival, which began with GameStop in 2021.
The Associated Press reports that GoPro gained 41 percent on Tuesday and jumped a further 12.4 percent to $1.54 a share on Wednesday, its highest level since March 2025. The action camera company has struggled in recent years; falling revenues have meant the company last posted an annual profit in 2022.
However, Steve Sosnick, Chief Strategist at Interactive Brokers, tells Reuters that meme stocks are losing their impact.
“People realize that there isn’t a fundamental reason for these rallies to be occurring. They’re simply occurring at the intersection of social media and the stock market,” Sosnick says.
Another analyst, Daniela Sabin Hathorn of Capital.com, says that, “These surges are often disconnected from company fundamentals and can reverse violently. Traders who chase momentum without an exit strategy may be caught in painful drawdowns.”
Meme Stocks
Many of these meme stocks come from the subreddit r/wallstreetbets and also X (formerly Twitter). They are called “short squeezes”, which happen when investors who have sold borrowed shares, expecting the price to fall, are compelled to buy them back at higher prices to cover their losses.
The first meme stock was video game retailer GameStop in 2021. The company was facing major challenges due to the industry’s move from physical discs to digital downloads, and many institutional investors were betting on its decline. That changed when individual investor Keith Gill, better known online as “Roaring Kitty”, rallied retail traders to buy up large amounts of GameStop stock, sending its price soaring.
At the start of 2021, GameStop shares were trading below $5. As of Wednesday, they closed at $23.96, per Associated Press.
Although the initial meme stock frenzy eventually lost steam, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. Periodic surges have affected other stocks, such as BlackBerry, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Chewy, in the years since.
Back in 2021, it took just a month for GameStop’s share price to skyrocket from under $5 to more than $120 — a level it hasn’t reached again. BlackBerry also saw a rapid climb that year, rising from under $7 to nearly $30, though those gains proved short-lived. Today, its U.S.-listed shares hover slightly above $4.
Earlier this month, a United States Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) of the International Trade Commission issued an “Initial Determination” that found Insta360 violated federal law by importing and selling products in the US that infringed on GoPro’s intellectual property.
Image credits: Matt Growcoot
