An online community of private investors, powered by Reddit and the convenience of online trading, massively gathered stocks from struggling companies over the last week of January and hedge funds in a downward spiral. The frenzy has turned struggling companies like GameStop, Blackberry, and others into what some call “ meme stocks, ” as crowdsourced investments spike their stocks.
Here are other companies that are seeing an explosion in their stock prices.
AMC
Buoyed by the attention on Wallstreetbets, the Reddit group feeding the GameStop mania, the movie theater chain has seen its stock price bounce from $ 5 on Monday to over $ 20, then back to $ 12.30 before trading on Friday.
That’s not the kind of action investors would normally expect from a company attacked by the US corona pandemic. In the most recent quarter, AMC lost $ 906 million. The company also reported a 92% drop in US visitors in the fourth quarter, from the same period a year ago, according to an SEC filing.
Earlier this week, AMC said it raised nearly $ 1 billion in new funding through stock offers and a new line of credit, but the future will ultimately be determined by the speed at which COVID-19 vaccinations are spread across the country.
Blackberry
Shares of the Canadian company, which now focuses on cybersecurity software sales, started the new year trading around $ 7. By Wednesday, the stock was up 255% to about $ 29, before falling to $ 17 before the U.S. markets opened on Friday.
The vertical increase is in stark contrast to Blackberry’s revenues for 2020. In the most recent quarter, Blackberry reported $ 794 million in losses. Once a top mobile phone vendor, Blackberry left the market last year after the vendor announced it would no longer make or sell Blackberry devices.
Blackberry said in a statement this week that it does not know what causes its stock to rise, adding that the company “has not made any material change in its business or business that has not been made public that reflects the recent increase in market price or trading volume. “
Bed Bath & Beyond
The household goods retailer saw its share price rise from $ 18 a share in early January to as much as $ 53 a share on Wednesday. But behind the bubble, the New Jersey-based company was severely challenged by the pandemic due to store closings and continued competition from IKEA and Target, among others.
The retailer’s 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 it did Close 200 stores permanently and transition to a “digital first” operation. Some of those closed stores are being turned into fulfillment centers – physical locations where online purchases can be picked up or packed for shipping.
In the most recent quarter, Bed Bath & Beyond reported a net loss of $ 75.4 million. Still, CEO Mark Tritton said in an earnings call earlier this month that the company’s “buy and pick up in-store online” strategy is promising in 2021.
“I think BOPIS at the overall industry level is a muscle and a new methodology that is very much accepted by the customer, and we are benefiting from that,” he said.
Naked brand
Shares of the Australian lingerie seller started the week at 40 cents and then rose to $ 3.50. Strikingly while it is hot, the company announced on Thursday that it would sell millions of new shares in an effort to raise $ 50 million.
Naked now joins a short but growing list of companies that Robinhood banned users from buying on Thursday. Potential investors are upset, Chris Tyson, Naked’s CEO, told the Wall Street Journal. The company has “seen a lofty theme of frustration with their ability to trade freely in shares of NAKD,” Tyson said.
Ahead of this week’s inexplicable gains, Naked was in danger of being dropped from the Nasdaq as it traded for less than a dollar for much of 2020. Nasdaq officials granted the company a 180-day extension in November to raise the price, a deadline ending March 24.
Nokia
Mobile phone review Nokia saw a one-day rise and fall in its stock price on Wednesday, opening the day at nearly $ 5 a share, and growing close to $ 10 a share by noon. The last time Nokia had a stock price of $ 10? December 2010.
The Finnish electronics company released a statement this week saying it did not know what caused its stock to increase sharply. Nokia is also on the current list of companies that Robinhood has blocked its customers from buying.
Nokia is currently anchored in several partnerships with several mobile technology companies, including Google Cloud and T-Mobile, to help build and expand 5G technology. However, the company faces stiff competition in the US 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 become the global leader in 5G.
Commodities and Cryptocurrencies
A “short squeeze” in the silver market became the hot topic of discussion on the subreddit Wallstreetbets, after which stocks related to the precious metal saw their value suddenly rise Thursday morning for no apparent reason.
First Majestic Silver, a Canadian silver mining company with the ticker symbol AG, maintained a stock price of about $ 14 a share for most of this month, but then shot up 21% Thursday. Fortuna Silver Mines saw its stock price rise 14% to $ 7.62 on Thursday. iShares Silver Trust, an 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 stock to GameStop, and “Highest short float in the industry, nice leverage on silver, and just over 10 too. years of resistance broke. “
Silver is widely used in jewelry and solar panel manufacturing, one of the reasons some analysts expect it to outperform gold by 2021.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency Dogecoin is trading at a record high of $ 0.08, according to the largest US crypto exchange Coinbase. The historic boost comes a day after subreddit SatoshiStreetBets, which calls itself crypto’s Wallstreetbets, coordinated an attempt to buy Dogecoin.
“The world held Dogecoin for us at between $ 0.05 and $ 0.06,” said one user. “Now the US is waking up. Time to buy this rocket to the moon and move on.”
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 now valued at $ 5.8 billion.