![]() Retail investors had played right into Cohen’s hands. It was old news, but Bed Bath & Beyond stock jumped 70 percent following the disclosures. The filings once again showed that Cohen owned far-out-of-the-money call options on Bed Bath & Beyond, essentially wagering that the stock would soar above $80. But in August, when Cohen had to redisclose his position in Bed Bath & Beyond owing to a change in the company’s total amount of shares, the apes on Reddit interpreted it to mean Cohen had gone bullish again on the company - despite the fact that he hadn’t traded any shares in months. With Cohen’s investment, Bed Bath & Beyond had officially become a meme stock.Īfter an initial pop on the news of Cohen’s involvement, its share price sank back down, dipping below $5 in July. In early 2021, Cohen led an activist campaign to resurrect the company’s left-for-dead stock, inspiring retail investors on Reddit to send its share price soaring and, in the process, blowing up a hedge fund or two that had shorted GameStop. It appeared that Cohen, the billionaire founder of Chewy, the “Amazon for pets,” was using the same playbook he’d applied to the video-game retailer GameStop. In March, the company added three of Cohen’s director picks to its board. The purchase added to a stake that at its height was worth in excess of $175 million and made Cohen one of the coupon-loving big-box chain’s largest shareholders. Cohen that day had scooped up another quarter-million shares of Bed Bath & Beyond. “Why waste money on college when Wikipedia is free?” Cohen tweeted in late January, along with a pornographic image from the Wikipedia page for the sex position 69. But in all likelihood the meme-stock phenomenon is here to stay - even if Cohen and his ilk are profiting off the backs of the “apes” who support them. The tragic consequences of Bed Bath & Beyond’s whiplashing fortunes have cast an even darker cloud over Cohen’s reputation. It’s not clear what relationship Arnal and Cohen had, if any (there is reportedly no record of private communications between them), but it was hard to dismiss as mere coincidence the fact that both men had profited from Cohen’s stockfluencer brand of YOLO investing. Cohen, by contrast, has emerged in recent years as Wall Street’s meme-stock king, posting and trolling his way - one poop emoji at a time - to becoming the Reddit version of a populist hero. ![]() Arnal was a Fortune 500 veteran who had spent most of his career at the multinational Procter & Gamble colleagues reportedly remembered him as a straitlaced professional and workaholic. ![]() There was one other wrinkle to the mystery of Arnal’s death: a perfectly timed $1.4 million stock sale at the peak of a surge in Bed Bath & Beyond’s stock in August, a frenzy initiated by a 37-year-old Florida man named Ryan Cohen - which had instigated a class-action lawsuit alleging that Arnal and Cohen had conspired to pump and dump shares of the company. Bed Bath & Beyond, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, had announced just days before that it would cut 20 percent of its staff and close 150 stores. Arnal reportedly did not leave a note, but his plunge came a day after he closed a $500 million deal to shore up the ailing retailer. Right before Labor Day weekend, Gustavo Arnal, the chief financial officer of Bed Bath & Beyond, jumped to his death from the “Jenga Building,” Tribeca’s tallest skyscraper. ![]()
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