Research

GME: from one in seven WSB comments to a rounding error

In January 2021, GameStop didn't just move a share price — it swallowed a subreddit. We indexed every GME mention on r/wallstreetbets from 2020 to today to ask a simple question: what is actually left of the meme that supposedly never dies?

“The meme that never dies” is one of retail investing's favorite lines, and GME is its patron saint. Diamond hands, apes together strong, the stock that broke Wall Street. But a meme lives or dies by whether people are still talking about it — so we went and counted.

We pulled every mention of GameStop's ticker in r/wallstreetbets comments and lined it up against the share price, day by day, from September 2020 through 2026-07-06. The picture is not the immortal meme of legend. It's a single, blinding supernova followed by five years of near-total silence.

What we measured

Two things, kept deliberately simple. First, attention: how many distinct r/wallstreetbets comments name GME each day, and how many different accounts are behind them. Second, stance: our purpose-built model reads every mention in context and scores it bullish, bearish or neutral, so we can watch the crowd's mood swing over time rather than guess at it. We set both against GME's split-adjusted price from market data. No forecasts, no secret sauce on display — just who was talking, how they felt, and what the stock did.

One supernova, then silence

Here is the whole arc on one canvas: GME's price on top, the daily flood of bullish (green) and bearish (red) mentions below.

At the peak in January 2021, GME appeared in 32,649 separate comments in one month — 14.6% of everything said on r/wallstreetbets, or roughly one comment in seven. The single busiest day, January 28, 2021, carried 6,190 GME mentions. On that day the conversation was overwhelmingly practical and defiant: our thread titles that day are dominated by lists of which brokerages were still processing buy orders and by calls to keep holding. It was the day the meme collided with plumbing.

Then the fade. Broken out by year, the drop is almost comic in its steepness.

From about 99,000 mentions in 2021, GME fell to 19,700 in 2022, 640 in 2023, and just a few dozen a year after that. There was one genuine revival — a sharp spike in both price and chatter in May 2024, when the stock briefly doubled and mentions flickered back to life for a few days — but it was a candle, not a comeback. Over the trailing 365 days, the entire subreddit produced 33 GME mentions from 32 different accounts. That is 0.004% of all comments, and it ranks GME #202 by mentions — behind the index itself, the big AI names, and a long tail of tickers no one writes songs about.

A crowd, not an echo chamber

The easy cynical read is that meme stocks are pumped by a handful of loud accounts. GME's peak was the opposite. In the first quarter of 2021, 29,887 distinct accounts posted about GME. The busiest 1% of them accounted for only 17.6% of mentions — and across the whole record, no account averaged more than about three GME mentions a month. This was a genuine multitude showing up on its own, not a small ring amplifying itself.

That is what makes the silence since so striking. The GME conversation didn't shrink to a hardcore core of diehards still posting daily — it dissolved. In the last year every mention came from a different account, each surfacing once and moving on. The apes didn't regroup. They dispersed.

The crowd never turned on the stock

Where they were present, though, they were loyal. Across the meme era GME's bull share averaged 63% — the crowd was structurally bullish and never once flipped to net-bearish for long, even through an 80%+ drawdown from the peak.

The mood did track the drama. Bull share ran as high as 90% the week the stock topped in late January 2021, then cracked to roughly 48% the week the squeeze broke in early February — the closest the crowd ever came to doubt. But zoom out and the loyalty is unmistakable: bullishness was actually a touch higher when the stock was cheap (about 77% bull at the lowest prices) than when it was expensive (about 71% at the highest). This crowd bought the dip as an article of faith. They didn't leave GME because they turned bearish. They left because they stopped showing up at all.

Attention chased the price — it didn't lead it

The last question is the one that matters for anyone using retail chatter as a signal: did the crowd's attention anticipate GME's big moves, or react to them? We cross-correlated the daily mention count with the size of each day's price move, sliding the two series up to five trading days apart.

The answer is lopsided. The correlation peaks at a lag of −1 day (r = +0.73): mentions surge hardest the day after a big price move. Look left of center — the “price moved first” bars — and they tower over the “mentions moved first” bars on the right (r fades from +0.42 to +0.25 as you look further ahead). On GME, in other words, attention overwhelmingly chased the price. The fireworks went off, and the crowd came running. That is the honest shape of a meme: volume is a coincident-to-lagging echo of volatility, not a crystal ball.

So what's left of GME?

The legend, mostly. The ticker is still a cultural landmark and the stock still trades around $22, but as a living r/wallstreetbets conversation GME is effectively over. What our data shows isn't a meme that never dies — it's a meme whose power was always the crowd, and the crowd has moved on. The attention that once pointed at GameStop now points at the AI trade: today the busiest tickers on the subreddit are the index, NVDA, and Micron, with GME buried two hundred names down. The same reflex that made retail pile into a struggling game-store chain is alive and well — it just found a new object. We watched a version of it happen in real time when SpaceX's IPO sent traders chasing the ticker that merely sounded like the company.

Meme stocks don't die when the price falls. They die when the room goes quiet.