Markets can forgive a company a lot when investors can see a path to growth. GameStop (GME) has spent years searching for that path, moving from video-game retailer to meme-stock phenomenon and now to a company increasingly built around collectibles. The latest numbers suggest the strategy may be working operationally. But a better business does not automatically make a better stock.

GameStop touched a two-year intraday low of $17.79 on Aug. 20. By Sept. 17, it had closed at $22.77, a 28% gain from that low. The rally comes as Jim Cramer says the turnaround is finally taking hold.

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That may be true. The bigger question for investors is what they are actually buying.

GameStop Is Becoming a Collectibles Company

Let’s start with the good news. GameStop’s latest transformation is showing up in the income statement.

In its fiscal second quarter ended Aug. 1, collectibles revenue jumped 57% year-over-year (YoY) to $356.3 million, representing 45.1% of total sales. Video-game revenue, meanwhile, fell 47% to $263.2 million.

The shift is unmistakable. GameStop still sells video games and pre-owned products while maintaining a small Bitcoin (BTCUSD) position, but collectibles are increasingly the centerpiece. The company generated $160.2 million of operating income in the quarter, up from $66.4 million a year earlier, and raised its fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA forecast to more than $650 million.

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The collectibles market is large—Grand View Research estimates it will reach $335.7 billion globally in 2026 and $535.5 billion by 2033—but GameStop is hardly alone.

eBay (EBAY) operates a massive secondary marketplace, while Target (TGT) says its trading-card business was on track to exceed $1 billion in 2025. The Pokémon Company sells collectibles and trading cards directly through Pokémon Center, while Hasbro (HAS) uses its Wizards of the Coast business and its Secret Lair store to sell premium Magic: The Gathering products directly to fans. That’s a pretty crowded field, one populated with bigger, healthier, and better-financed businesses.

Cramer Says Buy. Inverse Cramer Says What?

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Monica Caldas says she likes “living on the edge.” She’s tasked with rewiring a century-old company for what she calls “the intelligence era.” As EVP and global CIO at Liberty Mutual, her core idea is doing two hard things at once, modernizing old systems while rebuilding around AI. That means embedding AI across core work like underwriting and claims, with more than 100 capabilities already in production.

In May, Liberty became the first insurer to launch a ChatGPT auto-quoting app, part of a bigger bet on “agentic commerce,” where buying insurance shifts from filling out forms to simply having a conversation. “I love to solve big, hairy things with tech,” Caldas says. Her drive started early. She arrived in the U.S. from Portugal in third grade without knowing a word of English and became the first in her family to go to college.

Strategy bought 950 bitcoin for roughly $75.7 million last week and paid for it from cash on hand rather than new stock sales, according to an 8-K filing dated Sept. 21. The company, formerly known as MicroStrategy, now holds 846,000 BTC, its highest reported total since June.

The filing covers purchases made between Sept. 14 and 20 at an average price of $79,670 per coin. Across all holdings, Strategy has spent about $63.8 billion, an average of $75,416 per bitcoin.

A change in how the buying is funded

What marks this filing out is the funding. Strategy’s recent accumulation runs have typically been financed through at-the-market equity offerings, selling new shares to raise cash. This time the company said the purchases came from its USD Cash reserve, which stood at $1.05 billion as of Sept. 20. A second bucket, the USD Reserve, held $5.04 billion on the same date.

The same filing shows Strategy repurchased 1,771,238 shares of its STRC preferred stock for $174 million, and used $57.4 million of the USD Reserve to pay preferred dividends and interest on outstanding debt. It reported no bitcoin sales under its at-the-market offering during the week.

The shift matters because it suggests the company is no longer leaning on new share issuance to fund the treasury, after a stretch in which its preferred stock traded below par and reserve money went to servicing it. The filing discloses the buyback but not its rationale.

Mark-to-market figures from the week put the holdings at around $71.9 billion, implying roughly $8.1 billion in paper gains. Those numbers move with bitcoin’s price and should be read as a snapshot, not a balance.

846,000 BTC is more than 4% of bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap. The company’s reported peak was 847,363 BTC in June, before it sold 1,363 coins.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has issued a warning to regulated exchanges about “mention markets,” a type of prediction contract that settles based on whether a person says or does something. In a Tuesday advisory, the regulator said these contracts carry a heightened risk of manipulation and should only be listed in limited circumstances under the Commodity Exchange Act.

The guidance comes as prediction market activity draws growing regulatory scrutiny, particularly after enforcement actions tied to allegations that traders benefited from non-public information. For exchanges weighing whether to list event contracts tied to an individual’s specific words or conduct, the CFTC’s letter lays out a framework for assessing settlement verifiability and oversight readiness.

Key takeaways

• The CFTC says “mention markets” present a heightened manipulation risk because settlement depends on a person’s discrete conduct, which may not be verifiable or independently generated.
• The commission advised that there are only “limited circumstances” where mention markets can be listed consistently with the Commodity Exchange Act.
• Exchanges should evaluate oversight capabilities to detect manipulation and whether settlement criteria are independently verifiable.
• External pressure that could influence the subject’s conduct—and any related obligations the subject may have—are part of the CFTC’s review.
• The warning follows enforcement involving prediction contracts tied to political speeches, underscoring the regulator’s focus on information advantage and settlement conduct.

Why “mention markets” drew a regulator warning

In its advisory, the CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight said mention markets—contracts based on whether an individual will say certain words, attend or appear at an event, or interact with another person—may be inconsistent with the Commodity Exchange Act except in narrow cases.

The regulator’s central concern is that the settlement mechanism relies on conduct that can be neither independently generated nor externally verifiable. According to the CFTC, that structure “presents a heightened risk of manipulation” because it can make it easier for market participants to affect outcomes or profit from information advantages related to someone’s future actions.

The CFTC press release about the advisory is available via the regulator’s website: https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9302-26.

Enforcement history is shaping the regulator’s approach

The CFTC’s warning arrives amid a string of allegations and cases where traders were accused of using privileged information to profit in prediction markets. One prominent example cited in the report involves a former White House teleprompter operator who was ordered last month to return $107,539 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty related to contracts tied to then-President Donald Trump’s speeches.

Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph discussed that case in the context of how politically tied prediction contracts can intersect with information access. See: https://cointelegraph.com/news/trump-teleprompter-operator-made-100k-betting-kalshi-markets-tied-to-speeches-abc.

By emphasizing the risks tied to “discrete conduct” and limited verifiability, the CFTC’s guidance signals that settlement design matters as much as trading behavior. Even if a contract’s price action reflects legitimate market views, the regulator appears concerned when the contract outcome can be influenced—or when market participants can act on information about what a person will do or say before that conduct becomes public.

What exchanges are expected to consider

According to reporting by CNBC, the CFTC letter outlines four factors that exchanges listing mention markets should consider:

• Whether there are adequate oversight measures in place to detect manipulation.
• Whether the words or actions used for settlement are independently verifiable.
• Whether external pressure could influence the subject’s conduct, potentially affecting whether the event occurs as expected.
• What outside obligations the subject of the mention market may have, which could shape their behavior or the likelihood that the contract condition will be met.

This checklist frames mention markets not just as a novel product category, but as a compliance and risk-management challenge. Exchanges that previously treated these contracts as straightforward event bets may now need to demonstrate stronger controls around how outcomes are determined and how manipulation could realistically occur.

CFTC leadership ties the advisory to “regulatory clarity”

CFTC Chair Mike Selig publicly welcomed the guidance in an X post on Tuesday, saying that “regulatory clarity drives sound markets.” In the post, he referenced staff reminding designated contract markets (DCMs) of their obligation to list only contracts that are not readily susceptible to manipulation.

The chair’s post is available at: https://x.com/ChairmanSelig/status/2102500746834874859?s=20.

While the advisory is addressed to regulated entities, the implications extend across the broader prediction market ecosystem. As more contracts are designed around human behavior—rather than purely observable, externally confirmed outcomes—platforms may face tighter scrutiny on whether the settlement criteria can be verified without ambiguity and whether market structure could incentivize gaming of the subject’s conduct.

What to watch next for prediction markets

Exchanges considering mention markets will likely need to document how their oversight can identify manipulation and how settlement conditions can be verified. The most immediate uncertainty for market participants is how broadly regulators will interpret the “limited circumstances” standard—particularly as more politically or socially contingent contracts come under review.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission advised some of its regulated entities on Tuesday that prediction markets’ “mentions” contracts are at greater risk of manipulation. 

In a press release announcing the letter it sent to designated contract market entities, the CFTC said that the contracts are more susceptible to exploitation “because their settlement turns on the discrete conduct of a person that may be neither independently generated nor externally verifiable.”

The letter noted that the agency was not creating new obligations that regulated exchanges need to follow, but rather advising entities on when mention markets may be listed consistent with the Commodity Exchange Act, the law that governs the assets that the CFTC regulates. 

Mention markets — which are made up of contracts that ask traders what specific words will be used in a speech, a corporate earnings call or during a television broadcast — have come under scrutiny by the CFTC. CNBC reported in August that the agency was conducting an internal review into the contract type, and that platform Kalshi pulled its sports-related mention markets in response to the inquiry. 

Kalshi is one of the few U.S. regulated platforms that features mention markets. Its chief rival, Polymarket, only features them on its international exchange, which is not regulated by the CFTC.

“We’ve addressed this guidance based on a prior discussion with the CFTC,” Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said in a statement.

Mention markets also generated headlines in July after news reports that a longtime teleprompter operator for President Donald Trump profited off of trades on Kalshi related to contracts on mention markets that were tied to the president’s statements. Gabriel Perez, the teleprompter operator, settled with the CFTC in August and was forced to pay a $172,539 fine for insider trading on a prediction market. 

In the letter, the CFTC advised that exchanges listing mention markets should consider four factors: what outside obligations the subject of the mention market may have; external pressure that could influence the subject’s speech or conduct; whether the words or actions used for settlement are independently verifiable; and whether there are adequate oversight measures in place to detect manipulation on the contracts. 

The CFTC added that it encourages exchanges to engage with the agency’s division of market oversight while in the early phases of designing mention market contracts on how to mitigate manipulation risks. 

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.