Psst. We’ve got a “hot tip” for you. The kind that, on Wall Street, promises riches and rewards. Want to ride the market to the moon? Pick your winners.
And to pick your winners, pick the meme stocks. Not the AMCs and the GameStops of the world — they’re so early 2021. Gets crowded in those names, too.
No … the trick is to find the next batch of meme stocks. You’ll have to wait for the payoff, which entails reading through to the end of the article.
Before you get there, fair warning: The marriage of social media, retail stock trading, and online platforms that make it a cinch to buy stocks may have leveled the playing field, bringing the game to anyone who wants to play.
But the meme stocks rise and fall on their touts, where WallStreetBets and Reddit become megaphones for what’s hot, and the cycle speeds up: What’s hot today may not be hot this afternoon, which means what you bought on Monday morning may be lower, by far, on Monday afternoon.
Mark Mobius, founding partner of Mobius Capital Partners, told CNBC, “A lot of people have cash in hand that they want to do something with, and secondly, a lot of people are confused. The fact that they’ve seen bitcoin, which they had so much faith in, go down the way it’s gone down confuses people,” he said. “So you have a funny situation with a lot of money in their pocket and lots of confusion and disorientation, so I think that’s what driving a lot of these crazy moves in the market.”
Bitcoin may be one of the most meme of the memes (OK, maybe Dogecoin is). The cryptos lend themselves to all sorts of tweets and emojis (just ask Elon Musk). Dogecoin, for example, even has a dog on a coin.
But it is the gamification of stock trading in general that can make a superstar of any name, in any vertical, seemingly, at any time.
Just today (June 9), as Yahoo Finance reported, Geo Group (GEO), which owns and manages private prisons, shares were up more than 55 percent in intraday trading. Separately, Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE), likewise, rose as much as 46 percent, and at this writing was up 20 percent. The enthusiasm is stoked on social media with exhortations, the site reported, such as “CLNE to $15” and “so fresh, so CLNE.”
So: In discussing and dissecting the anatomy of a meme stock, might we propose that “the name’s the thing, wherein you’ll catch the zing?” (Sorry, Shakespeare.)
The Next Bumper Crop
Maybe the next bumper crop of meme names will be tied to … well, names. Stock symbols that spell out a noun, a verb, a theme, sparking your memory and familiarity, so that they’ll draw the next round of hot hands. Here are just a few tickers that fit the bill – never mind what the companies do, what their operating histories might be, or what future prospects might beckon. PAY. CAKE. EAT. MOO. If you’d like some nostalgia with your speculation, Atari (PONGF) trades over the counter. Krispy Kreme is seeking to go public — again.
In this environment, you might do well to throw a dart at list of names, then take that name, and start touting it on the social media platform of your choice.
One day, the term “meme stock” may spawn a meme of its own — or scores of them, shorthand for a time when frenzy begat frenzy, where fortunes were lost as quickly as they were made, where a simple Latin phase sums it all up, neatly: Caveat emptor.
