Premarket action Monday morning was a bit muted. The S&P 500 and the Dow ones industrials were up slightly, while the Nasdaq was roughly flat. S&P futures contracts, aka spoos (significant payments of other sorts), drove trading lower early, but the move faded as buying the dip took over. Crude oil traded up by about a dollar at just over $82 a barrel, even following reports that the Biden administration is considering releasing crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Bitcoin traded up about 5% at more than $66,000, and yields on 10-year Treasury notes dipped by four basis points to 1.486%.
The big movers Monday morning were Chinese education and tutoring stocks. The Wall Street Journal had an exclusive report Monday morning that the government has plans to license more than a dozen companies to offer after-school tutoring services. This comes after months of prohibiting the companies from making profits from teaching school curricula. Big movers in the morning include Gaotu Techedu Inc. (NYSE: GOTU), up nearly 20%; New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (NYSE: EDU), up more than 10%; and TAL Education Group (NYSE: TAL), up 8.5%).
Among meme stocks, we’ll lead off the week with the latest report from Fintel on the stocks most likely to experience a short squeeze this week. For the second week in a row, Progenity Inc. (NASDAQ: PROG) is the best bet for a short squeeze this week. Just over 35% of the company’s float is sold short, and no amount of effort from retail investors trying to drive the share price higher is having much effect on short sellers. Over the past 30 days, Progenity stock has gained 142%. Since July, the stock is up nearly 800%.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (NYSE: AMC) added about 16% to its share price last week and traded up nearly 4% in Monday’s premarket. We noted last week that movie fans have shown a decided preference for going to theatres for big new releases. Overall domestic gross receipts for the past weekend came in at $109 million, up 67.5% week over week. AMC also announced Monday morning that it has struck a deal to bring four Disney favorites back to the big screen for the coming weekend. These are “surprise” screenings, and each movie will play once per day for a ticket price of $5. Clever idea.
Lucid Group Inc. (NASDAQ: LCID) added more than 9% to its share price last week and the stock traded up more than 3.6% in Monday’s premarket. The company delivered its first vehicles to customers on the last Saturday of October (as it had promised to do), and the company appears still to be riding the wave.
Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) traded down about 5% Monday morning after adding nearly 8% to its share price last week. Over the weekend, CEO Elon Musk ran a Twitter poll asking followers if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock. Nearly 58% said he should, and he had promised to follow the results of the poll. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote Monday morning that the 10% stake was higher than what Wall Street expected but was still a “digestible” amount and that Ives wasn’t concerned: “We would rather Musk rip the band-aid off now and sell this portion of stock rather than it lingering over the next year and feeding into any non-fundamental bear thesis on the story.”
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