An online community of retail investors, driven by Reddit and the ease of online trading, has spent the last week of January massively capturing shares of struggling companies, sending highlights hedge funds at a forced point. The frenzy has turned companies into problems like GameStop, Blackberry and others in what some call “meme stocks,” as multidisciplinary investing sharply increases its shares.
Here are other companies that are seeing an explosive jump in their stock prices.
AMC
Driven by attention to Wallstreetbets, the Reddit group that fuels the GameStop craze, the movie chain has seen its stock price go from 5 Monday to more than $ 20 and then back to 12 , $ 30 before trading Friday.
This is not the kind of action that investors would normally expect from a company that has been hit by Coronavirus pandemic. In its most recent quarter, AMC lost $ 906 million. The company also reported a 92% drop in U.S. attendance in the fourth quarter, compared to the previous year, according to an SEC filing.
Earlier this week, AMC said it raised nearly $ 1 billion in new financing through the stock offering and a new line of credit, but its future will ultimately be determined by how quickly it is distribute COVID-19 vaccines nationwide.
Blackberry
Shares of the Canadian company, which now focuses on selling cybersecurity software, began trading around $ 7 in the new year. On Wednesday, shares had shot up 255% to about $ 29 before falling back to $ 17 before U.S. markets opened on Friday.
The vertical rise contrasts with Blackberry’s earnings in 2020. In its most recent quarter, Blackberry posted losses of $ 794 million. When it was the best-selling mobile phone, Blackberry hit the market last year after its supplier announced that it would no longer manufacture or sell Blackberry devices.
Blackberry said in a statement this week that it does not know what causes its shares to increase, adding that the company has not made “any material changes in its business or matters that have not been publicly disclosed that explain the recent increase in market price or trading volume. “
Bed Bath & Beyond
The home goods retailer saw its share price rise from $ 18 per share in early January to $ 53 per share on Wednesday. But behind the bubble, the New Jersey-based company has been severely challenged by the pandemic due to store closures and continued competition from the size of IKEA and Target.
Retail sales began to plummet during the first wave of COVID-19 infections last year, with the company temporarily closing 90% of its US and Canadian stores between March and June. A month later, the company said yes permanently close 200 stores and the transition to a “digital first” operation. Some of these closed stores are becoming compliance centers, physical locations where online purchases can be picked up or packaged to ship.
In its most recent quarter, Bed Bath & Beyond posted a net loss of $ 75.4 million. Still, CEO Mark Tritton said in a profit call earlier this month that the company’s “buy online and pick up in-store” strategy is promising in 2021.
“I think, at the industry-wide level, BOPIS is a muscle and a new methodology that is very much accepted by the customer, and it also benefits from it,” he said.
Brand new
Shares of the Australian lingerie retailer began trading at 40 cents a week and then rose to $ 3.50. Surprisingly when it’s hot, the company announced Thursday that it was selling millions of new shares in a move to raise $ 50 million.
Naked now joins a short but growing list of companies that Thursday Robinhood has restricted user purchases. Aspiring investors are irritated, Naked CEO Chris Tyson told the Wall Street Journal. The company “has seen a high level of frustration over its ability to freely trade NAKD shares,” Tyson said.
Prior to this week’s unexplained increase, Naked was in danger of being withdrawn from the Nasdaq because it spent much of 2020 trading for less than a dollar. Nasdaq officials granted the company a 180-day extension in November to raise its price, a deadline that expires on March 24th.
Nokia
Nokia’s backlog of mobile phones had a one-day stock price rise and fall on Wednesday, opening the day at nearly $ 5 per share and rising nearly $ 10 per share around noon. The last time Nokia had a $ 10 stock price? December 2010.
This week, the Finnish electronics company released a statement that did not know what caused an increase in its stocks. Nokia is also on the current list of companies that Robinhood has blocked the purchase of its customers.
Nokia is currently partnering with several mobile technology companies, including Google Cloud and T-Mobile, to help build and expand 5G technology. Still, the company faces fierce competition in the United States and abroad with Huawei from China and Ericsson from Sweden. Nokia’s new CEO Pekka Lundmark said in October that the company will do “whatever it takes” to be the world leader in 5G.
Commodities and cryptocurrencies
A “small squeeze” in the silver bullion market became the hot topic of debate over the Wallstreetbets subreddit, after which precious metal-related stocks saw their value rise sharply Thursday morning for no apparent reason. .
First Majestic Silver, a Canadian silver mining company with the symbol AG, held a stock price of about $ 14 per share for most of this month, but then rose 21% on Thursday. The Fortuna silver mines saw their price rise 14% on Thursday to $ 7.62. iShares Silver Trust, a stock exchange-traded fund that tracks silver prices, rose nearly 6% on Thursday to nearly $ 25 a share.
“$ AG is essentially $ GME for silver,” a Reddit user posted Thursday, comparing First Majestic Silver’s shares to GameStop, adding “The industry’s tallest short float, good leverage in the silver and also exploded above ten-year resistance. “
Silver is widely used in the production of jewelry and solar panels, one of the reasons some analysts expect it to surpass gold in 2021.
Meanwhile, the Dogecoin cryptocurrency is trading at an all-time high of $ 0.08, according to the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US Coinbase. The historic impetus comes a day after subrediting SatoshiStreetBets, called Wallstreetbets of Cryptography, which coordinated an effort to buy Dogecoin.
“The world kept Dogecoin for us between $ 0.05 and $ 0.06,” one user posted. “Now the United States is waking up. It’s time to buy and continue this rocket to the moon.”
Dogecoin started in 2013 and is based on a popular meme of a Shiba Inu dog named Doge. Dogecoin is not as popular as bitcoin or ether, but it has a loyal following. According to Coinbase, Dogecoin is valued at $ 5.8 billion.