Shares of AMC Entertainment nearly doubled on Wednesday — but Mudrick Capital, which liquidated a $230 million position in the movie exhibitor a day earlier, isn’t eating its heart out, sources told The Post.
Even as the stock doubled to $62.55 — up 95 percent from the previous day’s close of $32.04 — people close to the hedge fund shrugged it off. One insider said of the brief flirtation with AMC stock, “It’s history,” adding that there were “no regrets.”
That’s despite the fact that investors in Mudrick — who on Tuesday made a quick, relatively modest profit on a chunk of 8.5 million shares the fund had bought from the company in a secondary offering — could have made hundreds of millions of dollars staying in the stock for an extra 24 hours.
Indeed, the latest Reddit rally on Wednesday continued to pump AMC to an unprecedented market capitalization of more than $28 billion.
The rub? Most of Mudrick’s investors come from a different world than Redditors — “one that values business based on fundamentals,” according to a source close to the fund. Likewise, the fund’s backers recognize that stock-price fluctuations aren’t evidence of value, even if they are sending the shares to sky-high levels, sources said.
On Wednesday morning, AMC CEO Adam Aron unveiled a new initiative to engage with the movie exhibitor’s “extraordinary base of enthusiastic and passionate individual shareholders.” The program will offer various rewards for retail investors including special communication from Aron and free popcorn.
That was a day after AMC admitted in a securities filing that its current market capitalization “reflects valuations that diverge significantly from those seen prior” and that “purchasers of our Class A common stock could incur substantial losses if there are declines … driven by a return to earlier valuations.”