Investing

Midday Meme Stock Report for 11/19: Bakkt, Cassava Sciences, Lucid, Rivian, UWMC

Paul Ausick

Published: November 19, 2021 1:19 pm

Noon-hour trading was a bit mixed Friday, with the Dow Jones industrials down 162 points while the S&P 500 was up almost nine points and the Nasdaq up about 110 points after pinning a new intraday high. Crude oil continued to slide, with West Texas Intermediate spot prices down 4% to less than $76 a barrel and Brent down about 3.4% to less than $79 a barrel. Bitcoin steadied at around $58,000, and 10-year Treasury yields slipped by around four basis points.

Wholesale mortgage lender UWM Holdings Corp. (NYSE: UWMC) held on to most of its premarket gain through the noon hour Friday. UWM announced Thursday that it had terminated plans for a secondary stock offering and would immediately rev up its share buyback program. The secondary offering was intended to make the stock more attractive to institutional investors, but the price the big guys were willing to pay was too low. Comments on WallStreetBets mainly express frustration with the stock.

Bakkt Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BKKT) surged Friday morning on no specific news. The share price has trailed down by about 25% since the beginning of November, so this jolt is a welcome surprise.

Shares of Cassava Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ: SAVA) reversed a two-week slide that had sliced more than 50% from the share price. The company has announced that it has begun a second Phase 3 study for its Alzheimer’s drug.

And two electric vehicle stocks that have been kicked around over the past couple of days were putting up double-digit gains in the noon hour Friday. Neither Lucid Group Inc. (NASDAQ: LCID) nor Rivian Automotive Inc. (NASDAQ: RIVN) had any specific news. Other EV stocks are riding higher, too, following House passage of President Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package that includes tax credits for people who buy EVs.

As the noon hour drew to a close Friday, shares of Bakkt traded up 16% to $20.12, in a 52-week range of $8.00 to $50.80. The average daily trading volume is around 26.4 million shares, and more than 14 million had already traded on the day.

Cassava stock traded up more than 12%, at $54.31 in a 52-week range of $6.70 to $146.16. The average daily trading volume is around 8.7 million shares, and about 4.8 million had traded thus far on Friday.

UWM stock traded up about 18.5% to $6.54, in a 52-week range of $5.41 to $14.38. The average daily trading volume is around 2.4 million shares, and more than 20 million had traded.

Shares of Lucid were up about 11% to $52.23, in a 52-week range of $9.69 to $64.86. The average daily trading volume is around 59 million shares, and more than 105 million had traded.

Rivian stock traded up about 14%, at $137.35 in a post-IPO range of $95.20 to $179.47. The average daily trading volume is about 76 million shares, and 27.8 million had traded thus far.