The events surrounding Reddit and GameStop having underlined again that, although the fundamental value of a company and the social media sentiment surrounding it do always go hand in hand, in some cases it is the sentiment – rather than value – that drives the stock price.

The case of GameStop is quite exceptional and, moreover, it was not so much the sentiment, but the “buzz”, i.e., the volume of talk, that drove the stock price to sky-high levels: in the few days after January 27, 2021, the amount of media buzz surrounding GameStop (and its close contender AMC) was five times higher than that for the two other newsworthy companies: Tesla and Astra Zeneca.