Investing

Midday Meme Stock Report for 6/25: Virgin Galactic, Torchlight Energy, BlackBerry, GameStop

Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.

There’s only one big mover among meme stocks today and the jump in the stock’s share price is due to actual, positive news for the company. How the news will affect the stock over the long term is a different question. For today, though, investors are giddy.

Earlier Friday, we reviewed the latest short seller data for six meme stocks. In general, short sellers avoided these stocks during the two-week reporting period that ended on June 15.

Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. (NYSE: SPCE) announced Friday morning that it had received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that allows the company to fly customers to space. Virgin Galactic said “the first time the FAA has licensed a spaceline to fly customers.” Both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have been gearing up to carry paying customers into space on what have been called joyrides and SpaceX carried its first human passengers into space last year. Virgin Galactic has also completed three flights with humans on board following a 2014 crash that killed one of the craft’s pilots.

Torchlight Energy Resources Inc. (NASDAQ: TRCH) has yet to announce or pay out a promised special dividend due today. The payment is being made to shareholders of record as of June 24, so it’s a bit weird to see the stock trading sharply higher Friday morning. One amped-up investor urged other Torchlight shareholders to hold their positions: “If we HLOD today we force shorts to buy $MMATF and our overall price with go through the roof!”

MMATF is the over-the-counter ticker for Metamaterial, the Canadian company that is merging with Torchlight on June 30. Metamaterial will ascend to the Nasdaq once the merger is completed and the surviving company will get a new name.

BlackBerry Ltd. (NYSE: BB) reported an earnings miss after markets closed last night. Revenue came in better than expected, but that has not been enough to convince investors to buy the dip, even though the dip is sizable.

GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) shares have dropped by more than a third in the past 30 days. Not exactly what meme stock investors count on. The big drop came following the departure of former CEO George Sherman who left with $179 million worth of fully vested stock. The WallStreetBets investors thought that money should belong to them. Is it time for another short squeeze–or the threat of one–on GameStop shares?

Virgin Galactic stock traded up nearly 34% in the noon hour Friday at around $53.90 after peaking at $56.37. More than 171 million shares have been traded so far today, more than eight times the daily average of 20.4 million.

Torchlight Energy shares traded up nearly 9% at $5.20 in a 52-week range of $0.21 to $10.88. Average daily trading volume is 29.1 million and more than 63 million shares have changed hands in the first half of Friday.

BlackBerry has dropped more than 6% to trade at around $11.90 in the noon hour. The stock’s 52-week range is $4.37 to $28.77. Average daily trading volume on the stock is about 41.5 million shares while Friday morning trading has been light at around 26 million shares.

GameStop shares traded down almost 4% at $203.88 in a 52-week range of 3.77 to $483.00. Volume has been light with just 2.6 million shares traded so far Friday against a daily average of 9.3 million.

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