Chris Murphy, co-head of derivatives strategy at Susquehanna International Group, said rising prices of other heavily-shorted stocks showed that this activity was spreading around the US stock market. The 50 stocks most frequently shorted by hedge funds have outperformed the S&P 500 so far this year, according to Goldman Sachs.

“If you’re an institution and you’re short some stocks, you may look at the GameStop situation and think it is not worth the risk, and cover your position,” Mr Murphy said. “And then you have shorts being covered everywhere.”

Analysts across Wall Street updated institutional clients including pension funds and hedge funds on Monday with lists of stocks they believed could face the same storm as GameStop and BlackBerry.

“You used to have a world where everyone was watching [CNBC presenter] Jim Cramer on TV and he would talk about something and [the stock] would go crazy,” said a trader at a large broker in New York, who requested anonymity. “You are now in a world where it is coming from a lot of social media platforms. In many ways, it is a lot more democratised . . . [but] it is more difficult to understand how much of it is real.”

Additional reporting by Patrick Temple-West and Robin Wigglesworth