I've seen "The analysts were also not understanding its potential" a few times and this is mostly incorrect. I know there were large value funds who had looked at GameStop and there was another primary reason the stock price was so low: management.

Value investors totally understood that there was a well-liked brand here that still had huge cash flows. And they knew all the bear cases about the move to digital and the retail biz dying.

A main reason there were value funds who analyzed GameStop and came to the "neutral" conclusion was that the old management team wasn't making any big moves to even attempt to turn around the death spiral.

DeepFuckingValue and even Michael Burry were half-wrong in their original thesis: just using cash flow to do stock buybacks was not necessarily going to turn GameStop around.

It wasn't until Ryan Cohen got involved, got on the board, and started pushing for serious e-commerce and digital initiatives that the stock and story majorly turned around and caused the momentum trade.