The reverse merger between Torchlight Energy and Metamaterials was completed at one minute past midnight on Monday morning and the surviving company, Meta Minerals Inc. (NASDAQ: MMAT) began trading at the opening bell. The results have not been pretty.
Shares were valued at $9.90 following the merger and opened for trading this morning at $9.77. The stock ran up a few pennies to trade briefly at $9.97 but eventually sank to down just over 20%. Retail investors who have been pushing the stock appear to have been bigfooted by short sellers who got the blame for driving the shares (and options) higher last week so that they could profit from a merger (aka, risk) arbitrage play. What happens next likely depends on how strongly retail investors who had been bidding up Torchlight respond to their current troubles.
Meta Minerals aside, winners are more abundant than losers in the meme stocks Monday. Among the winners is EV maker Workhorse Group Inc. (NASDAQ: WKHS). As of last Friday’s close, shares were up about 75% over the past 12 months, including a loss for the year to date of 21.% as of Friday. Still, the stock is a favorite among WallStreetBets investors that have pushed the shares up by around 10% in the first half of Monday trading.
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Another winner is meme investors’ favorite AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (NYSE: AMC). Over the past 12 months, AMC stock is up about 1,300%, less than half its year-to-date gain. Retail investors may be getting some help Monday from the best weekend for box office sales in over a year. More than 2 million Americans paid to watch a movie in an AMC theater this weekend. The tenth film in the Fast and Furious franchise, F9: The Fast Saga, raked in $70 million on its opening weekend. F&F is the fifth-highest grossing franchise of all time according to BoxOfficeMojo, with total worldwide receipts of $6.3 billion so far.
A blank-check company, Churchill Capital Corp. IV (NYSE: CCIV), announced Friday that it has scheduled a special shareholder meeting for Thursday, July 22 to vote on the company’s business combination with EV maker Lucid Motors. If approved, the transaction will take place on July 23 and the company will be renamed Lucid Group Inc. and trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LCID. The warrants issued in connection with the transaction will trade under the ticker LCID.WS. Churchill Capital IV will be delisted from the NYSE.
Meta Materials shares traded down nearly 18% at $8.20 in a first-trading day range of $7.60 to $9.97. Nearly 24 million shares have changed hands in the first half of Monday.
Shares of Workhorse traded up about 7.5% at $16.78 in a 52-week range of $7.07 to $42.96. Average daily trading volume is 18.3 million and more than 35 million shares have been traded so far Monday.
AMC’s stock traded up 7.5% in the noon hour Monday at $58.09 in a 52-week range of $1.91 to $72.62. Average daily trading volume is 155 million shares and more than 74 million had been traded by the end of the noon hour.
Capital Acquisition IV traded up more than 7% at $26.95 in a 52-week range of $9.60 to $64.86. Average daily trading volume is about 13.8 million shares and nearly that many have already been traded Monday.
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