Midday Meme Stock Report for 1/10: AMC, American Virtual Cloud, GameStop Tilray

Investing

Published: January 10, 2022 1:33 pm

All three major U.S. stock indexes traded lower in the noon hour Monday. The Nasdaq was down about 2.3%, the S&P 500 was down 1.7%, and the Dow Jones industrials were off 1.3%. All 11 market sectors traded lower, with consumer cyclicals down 2.7% and tech down 2.4%. Retailers, automakers and home improvement stores appear to be the hardest hit. Losers are outpacing winners by a margin of about three to one, while new lows on the Nasdaq were 11 times greater than new highs.

Crude oil traded roughly at its level earlier in the day at $78.25 a barrel. Bitcoin dipped only slightly and remained below $41,000. Even Treasury yields had moved little since during the morning, with both the 10-year and the two-year bonds each adding a single basis point.

Meme stocks on our watch list did not escape. Just four showed gains at noon. The big winner was marijuana grower Tilray Inc. (NASDAQ: TLRY) with a double-digit gain following the morning’s quarterly earnings report that included a surprise breakeven, when the estimates had projected a loss per share of seven cents. The company also showed strength in its home market (Canada) and increasing strength in Germany. Now, if only the United States would get off the dime and legalize pot.

AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. (NYSE: AMC) traded down by more than 7.5% Monday morning. That should be little surprise, given that the stock price had risen to about $30 before a slide that began at the end of December. There has really been no specific news from the company since CEO Adam Aron’s announcement last week that AMC would work on lowering its debt this year. Even the most feverish ape cannot get too excited about that.

Another OG meme stock taking its lumps Monday was GameStop Inc. (NYSE: GME), which has traded down by as much as 14.7%. Last Friday, the stock jumped 20% on a report that the mall retail operator was getting into the nonfungible token market. Yet, so are a host of other companies. The company had no specific news Monday.

American Virtual Cloud Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: AVCT) traded down by more than 7% in the morning but pared that loss in half as the noon hour ended Monday. Trading volume was light, even though American is the third-most likely stock to experience a short squeeze this week. According to Fintel data, about 11.5% (4.7 million shares) of the company’s float is sold short, while almost 43% (just over 3 million) of the dark pool shares are sold short.

Tilray stock traded up about 14.3% to $7.34 as the noon hour ended Monday. The stock’s 52-week range is $6.29 to $67.00, and the average daily trading volume is around 22.8 million shares. Nearly 86 million shares had traded thus far of Monday.

Shares of AMC traded down nearly 6%, at $21.62 in a 52-week range of $2.13 to $72.62. The average daily trading volume is around 43 million shares, and about 25 million had already traded.

GameStop stock was down about 10.5%, at $125.96 in a 52-week range of $19.01 to $483.00. The average daily trading volume is about 2.6 million shares, and almost 4.3 million had traded thus far.

American Virtual Cloud shares traded down about 3.9% to $2.25, in a 52-week range of $0.84 to $9.62. The average daily trading volume is about 18.6 million shares, and just 4.8 million had traded on Monday.