AMC (NYSE:AMC) is looking less like a short squeeze and more like an unstoppable force by the day. The company, in the middle of a major corporate turnaround, is reeling in revenue, impressing with earnings and prepping new innovations for rollout. Now, it’s attracting institutional investors, something that no short seller saw coming at the beginning of the year. Now, AMC stock is on the rise and moving investors.
The last month has been a heck of a ride for the theater chain. For one, it had its first major picture opening since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year in Marvel Studios’ Black Widow. The theater drew millions of customers to its seats, and the movie saw $80 million in gross revenue from its opening weekend. Had it not also gone directly to streaming, revenue could have been upward of $140 million.
More recently, the company has been stirring up chatter. It beat earnings estimates by a wide margin, seeing over $444 million in revenue during Q2. Not to mention, it cut cash outflow by nearly $70 million since Q1. Even more exciting to the AMC Ape Army is the company’s announcement that it is looking into accepting Bitcoin (CCC:BTC-USD) as a payment method for its theaters; CEO Adam Aron hasn’t provided a ton of detail yet, but the company says it is planning on implementing this payment option before the end of 2021.
AMC Stock Gets a Boost as Jim Simons Goes Long
Renaissance Technologies, one of the largest hedge funds in the U.S., is really banking on the success of AMC, much to the chagrin of institutional short sellers. Jim Simons’ investing giant held over 500,000 shares of AMC in March, just as the stock’s short squeeze saga was getting started. Today, though, things have changed drastically. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings show Simons’ group upped its position in AMC to over 1.8 million shares.
To do this, RenTech had to trim some fat from its portfolio. Maybe even more surprising than the huge increase in its AMC stock staking is where it dropped some of the weight; the hedge fund cut its holdings in Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) down 75%.
All in all, the news is helping AMC to bulk itself up yet again. The stock finished out the day with a near 7% gain, although it traded far below its average trading volume of over 174 million.
