Meme stocks: Looking at AMC through the years

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre traces the story of AMC's rise from its IPO to meme stock status.

Video transcript

BRAD SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live, everyone. It has been one year since the meme stock frenzy caught Wall Street by surprise, bringing a new generation of amateur traders to the table. GameStop, AMC, and others, of course, they became the unwitting banners of Wall Street Bets and that movement. But before they were being short sold on Wall Street, they represented an era of streaming and on-demand. For more on the origins of these meme stocks, Yahoo Finance's own Jared Blikre has more. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right, Brad. We did GameStop earlier, and it's a double dose today. So attention, all apes. We are talking about AMC, of course. AMC was founded all the way back in 1920 by a group of traveling performers who wanted to settle down and start their own theater in Kansas City, Missouri. Over the decades now, AMC grew into a footprint across the Midwest and eventually adopted the multiplex model in 1963. And by the late '60s, they had officially adopted the name American Multi-Cinema, or AMC.

The company first went public in 1983, the same year it expanded its screen numbers from 200 to 700. And after pioneering the movie industry in the US, the Kansas-based theater chain expanded into Asia and Europe in the 1990s. The chain even opened up the largest multiplex in the world at the time in Ontario, California in 1996.

Now the AMC ticker that is traded currently IPO'ed in 2013. This was a year after the Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group bought the company for $2.6 billion. And Wanda Group would own AMC Entertainment until February of 2021. And that was one week after the stock was swept up in the meme stock frenzy. We'll get to some stock charts in a second. In fact, it was exactly one year ago and a day that the stock surged 310%, thanks to Wall Street Bets. And we all know that phenomenon. We talked about it quite extensively at the time here at Yahoo Finance.

At the time, the company announced that it had secured new funding that would allow it to outlast the woes brought on by the coronavirus shutdowns. Now, one year later, AMC is still contending with the coronavirus. And I promise to get some charts here. Only recently, the theater chain just announced plans to refinance debt, and it was reported the company owes $5.5 billion as of September, as well as $376 million in outstanding lease payments. So AMC is still riding that wave here.

I want to go to the charts here because we see a lot of meme stocks have been under pressure this year. AMC down 45% year to date. But let's take a two-year look, and we can really see when it got started. Here's the original phenomenon that it surged with in GameStop. And like I said, that was a year and a day ago. But it really didn't get started until about June of this year. Now from this high to today's price, that is a decline of 80%, but par for the course with a lot of these meme stock. Guys.