Shares in a donut chain, camera company and meat-substitute maker surged Wednesday in a revival of meme stocks.
Krispy Kreme, the North Carolina-based chain with about 350 shops, soared as much as 25% on Wednesday.
GoPro, famous for its miniature action cameras, jumped 49% while Beyond Meat rose 11%.
Shares in Opendoor Technologies, an online platform that buys and sells real estate, plummeted 18% after a wild week in trading – rising more than 300% over the past week.
Kohl’s shares also fell 13% after gaining about 40% at the start of this week.
Social media buzz around the stocks and short squeezes spurred the rally, despite little change in these companies’ business fundamentals, according to Daniela Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.
“Krispy Kreme seems to be the latest addition to the frenzy,” Hathorn said in a note.
“Like the others, there was no significant news to justify the rally, just sheer retail momentum.”
It’s an apparent comeback for meme stocks, reminiscent of the GameStop chaos four years ago that famously forced Gabe Plotkin to shut down his hedge fund Melvin Capital Management.
Similar to that initial GameStop craze, this latest bout of meme stocks are soaring alongside broader market optimism. The S&P 500 has notched another all-time high and Bitcoin has doubled in less than a year.
Call volume on Krispy Kreme skyrocketed Tuesday, hitting a record of over 100,000 contracts trading – about 71 times the average daily volume over the past four years, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
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GoPro saw its highest call volume since 2021 with over 56,000 contracts, according to Bloomberg.
Traders on the WallStreetBets page on Reddit, known for orchestrating meme stock movements, suggested several companies, including Krispy Kreme.
The revival started last week, as shares in Opendoor surged massively – though Eric Jackson, founder and president of EMJ Capital, argued that Opendoor is not a true meme stock.
“I got into it because this is a real business. It’s got a real platform that it’s built and it’s definitely fallen on hard times, that’s why the stock is down like 99% or whatever it is from its all-time highs, but I just think the market got overly pessimistic about this,” Jackson told Bloomberg Podcasts on Tuesday.
Kohl’s, meanwhile, had more than doubled at one point on Tuesday.
Other stocks with relatively high short interest, like The Campbell’s Co., Aehr Test Systems, Polaris and Wendy’s, also attracted buyers this week.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
