Markets

Short-sellers borrow stock in the hopes of buying shares back later at a lower cost to repay the loan and pocketing the difference.

Gone are the days when bruised retail investors fled after prominent hedge funds bet against a stock—the GameStop effect is rippling across U.S. markets and spreading to Europe.

Wall Street had been weighed earlier by a slump in Boeing Co and by hedge funds dumping long positions to cover a short squeeze in GameStop Corp and AMC Entertainment.

AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc said on Wednesday it had raised $304.8 million by selling shares during an unprecedented social media-driven rally in its stock, though the U.S. movie theater firm could have raised about four times more by waiting one more day.

Funds sold long positions in stocks to pay for the losses, which sparked a 1% slide in Wall Street's main indexes.

For the Nasdaq, the decline snapped a five-session streak of gains, its longest run of daily gains since early November.