Midday Meme Stock Report for 12/16: Bakkt, East Stone Acquisition, IronNet, Tesla

Investing

Published: December 16, 2021 1:35 pm

The broad market traded down in the noon hour Thursday, but the Dow Jones industrials were holding on to a gain thanks to Chevron, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. If the energy and financials sectors weren’t doing so well (up 2.3% and 1.8%, respectively) even the blue chippers would be suffering.

Crude oil traded at around $72.50, up about 2.4% for the day. Bitcoin continued to linger at around $48,000, and the 10-year/two-year Treasury note spread had not moved much from its premarket level of 0.8%.

Among our meme stock watch list, losers outnumber winners by a wide margin. The big downer was Bakkt Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BKKT). The company filed a prospectus Wednesday registering nearly 191 million shares that may or may not be sold by selling shareholders. Bakkt will receive no proceeds from the sales. Prior to the filing, Bakkt had about 57.2 million shares outstanding and a public float of 39.3 million shares. But the total float, including a variety of non-publicly traded stock, totals more than 596 million shares. That’s a lot of potential dilution.

East Stone Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: ESSC) was generating a fair amount of chatter on social media for a stock that trades fewer than 700,000 shares a day. The company had no specific news Thursday.

IronNet Inc. (NYSE: IRNT) reported quarterly results after markets closed Thursday that badly missed revenue estimates and included a larger-than-expected loss per share.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) also traded down in the noon hour Thursday. The decline is due, at least in part, to a horrific accident in Paris last weekend that killed one person and injured 20 more when a Model 3 taxi reportedly accelerated on its own and it plowed into a crowd when the brakes failed. That’s the taxi driver’s story. The taxi company has stopped using its Tesla vehicles until the police investigation is completed.

Tesla told French authorities that none of the automaker’s data indicated that the accident was caused by a technical failure in the car. In its report on the incident, Reuters noted that after the U.S. National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration reviewed more than 200 similar complaints of sudden acceleration in Tesla vehicles, the agency found no defects in Tesla’s systems and concluded that the accidents were caused by “pedal misapplication.”

Shares of Bakkt traded down nearly 32% as the noon hour ended Thursday, at $9.40 in a 52-week range of $8.00 to $50.80. The average daily trading volume is around 17.8 million shares, and about 19.5 million had already traded on the day.

East Stone Acquisition traded down more than 14% to $13.14, in a 52-week range of $9.21 to $26.27. The average daily trading volume is about 690,000 shares, and more than a million had traded thus far.

IronNet stock dropped more than 28% to trade at $4.88, in a 52-week range of $4.74 to $47.50. The low was posted Thursday morning. The average daily trading volume is about 5.2 million shares, and almost 6 million had traded.

Shares of Tesla traded down about 4.3% to $934.50, in a 52-week range of $539.49 to $1,243.49. The average daily trading volume is about 26 million shares, and Thursday’s volume was nearing 17 million in the first minutes of the afternoon.

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