Midday Meme Stock Report for 10/22: Aterian, Cleveland-Cliffs, ContextLogic, Vinco Ventures

Investing

Published: October 22, 2021 1:21 pm

While the Dow Jones industrial stocks held on to a minuscule gain in the noon hour Friday, both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq traded lower. The Nasdaq was hammered, thanks to telecoms (down 2.6%) and tech (down 0.3%). Financials (up 0.8%) and consumer staples (up 0.7%) kept the S&P 500 above the breakeven line. Crude oil wiggled around but traded at the same price as in the morning, Bitcoin was back down to $61.277, and 10-year Treasury yields dropped about six basis points.

As a group, there are many more losers than winners among our basket of meme stocks, so we’ll start off by taking a look at the day’s big winner so far.

Steelmaker and iron ore miner Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (NYSE: CLF) may be the most unusual meme stock, but there you go. The stock jumped 27.5% in the first two weeks of this year as retail investors honed their chops for the short squeezes that followed two weeks later. Then the commodities super-cycle kicked in and Cliffs added another 32% to its share price. Two months later, the stock was up nearly 80% for the year to date. The lack of agreement on a U.S. infrastructure bill has weighed on the stock since mid-August, but then the company reported quarterly earnings Friday morning that showed profits rising from $2 million in the year-ago third quarter to $1.3 billion and revenue jumping about 265%. Real numbers from a real company don’t go unnoticed.

We noted in our premarket look at meme stock movers this morning that Vinco Ventures Inc. (NASDAQ: BBIG) had dropped about 7% on no specific news. We also noted that the company has delayed its spin-off dividend until late December. Who knows if retail investors are going to have a Merry Christmas?

E-commerce platform provider Aterian Inc. (NASDAQ: ATER) hasn’t had any specific news for nearly a month. That appears to have been honey to the bears, who have taken the share price down by more than 57% since September 22. Even 30% short interest in the stock is not enough to entice a squeeze try.

Shares of ContextLogic Inc. (NASDAQ: WISH) added more than 14% to its share price on Wednesday but gave back more than 5% on Thursday. Friday looked even worse as the noon hour drew to a close. CEO and founder Piotr Szulczewski exercised an option on 73,904 shares on Monday (at no cost) and immediately sold the shares for $5.00 a share. He still owns more than 56 million shares in the company, but that wasn’t a good look. Did he really need the $370,000 that badly?

Cleveland-Cliffs traded up more than 11% to $23.53 shortly after the noon hour ended. The stock’s 52-week trading range is $7.59 to $26.51, and it hit an intraday high of $24.10 before sliding a bit. The average daily trading volume is around 23 million shares, and nearly 43 million had changed hands already on the day.

Vinco Ventures traded down about 14.5%, at $5.12 in a 52-week range of $1.11 to $12.49. The average daily trading volume is about 56.5 million shares, and more than 31 million had already been traded.

Aterian was another double-digit loser Friday. The stock traded down about 12.4% to $7.62, in a 52-week range of $3.04 to $48.99. The average daily trading volume is about 25 million, and a scant 7.7 million had traded thus far.

ContextLogic dropped more than 9% to trade on Friday at $5.28, in a 52-week range of $4.61 to $32.85. The average daily trading volume is around 38.7 million shares, and as of the early afternoon Friday, the stock had traded more than 27 million shares.