In the noon hour Monday, U.S. markets were either adding to (S&P 500 and the Dow Jones industrials) gains made on Friday or recovering (the Nasdaq) from a loss. Those gains are coming despite share prices of coronavirus vaccine makers BioNTech and Moderna falling sharply as a consensus may be building that the vaccines will be less effective against the Omicron variant until they are reformulated. That means a new vaccine likely would not be available in quantity until March or April. Given the overall direction of the market, however, the decline in effectiveness is apparently not believed (by investors and traders) to have a broad impact on equities. All 11 sectors were trading in the green on last look.
Crude oil traded at around $68.40 a barrel, up 40 cents since our premarket report and about 3.3% from Friday’s settlement. Bitcoin traded flat at around $49,270, and 10-year Treasury bond yields had moved up five basis points since Friday to around 1.41%.
Among meme stocks, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) was hammered by more than 6% early Monday following a Reuters report that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that a whistleblower complaint was filed against the company in 2019 alleging that Tesla’s solar panel division failed to notify shareholders and the public of fire risk due to defects in the panels. Tesla acquired solar panel maker and installer SolarCity in 2016. This is not the first complaint filed with U.S. regulators related to the panels. Tesla settled a lawsuit filed by Walmart in 2019 alleging seven store fires were caused by Tesla’s solar panels.
GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) is ginning up chatter on social media and WallStreetBets. The company is scheduled to report quarterly results after markets close on Wednesday. If recent history is any sort of barometer, the stock will drop more than 10% following the report. That’s been the result in each of the 12 preceding quarters. We’ll have our preview of GameStop’s earnings Tuesday morning.
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Another EV maker is also facing off with the SEC. Lucid Group Inc. (NASDAQ: LCID) said Monday morning that it had received a subpoena related to its SPAC merger. The SEC has gotten more interested in SPAC mergers recently, and this investigation likely has more to do with the SPAC than it does with Lucid’s cars. Still, the shares were pasted Monday.
Another of the OG meme stocks, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (NYSE: AMC), has announced that based on the strong response to its first movie-themed NFT offer last week, the company is going to release a second one. Self-identified AMC shareholders who register with AMC’s Investor Connect program will receive the following free NFT:
One could argue that AMC should be spending more effort on increasing its revenue and less on giving away something to the very people who already love it.
AMC stock traded flat as the noon hour drew to a close Monday, at $29.01 in a 52-week range of $1.91 to $72.62. The average daily trading volume is about 46.4 million shares, and nearly 28 million had already traded on Monday.
Lucid traded down about 6.7% to $44.09, in a 52-week range of $9.83 to $64.86. The average daily trading volume is more than 69 million shares, and nearly 82 million had traded.
Tesla was down less than 1% to $1,009.77, in a 52-week range of $539.49 to $1,243.49. The average daily trading volume is about 25.5 million shares, and more than 19 million had traded.
Shares of GameStop traded down less than 1%, at $171.69 in a 52-week range of $12.14 to $483.00. The average daily trading volume is around 2.4 million, and 1.5 million had traded on the day.
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