(Bloomberg) — Vinco Ventures Inc. and Support.com Inc. surged to extend rallies fueled by retail investors in chatrooms like StockTwits and on Reddit.
The pair of stocks jumped more than 30% each Monday in New York, extending gains from last week, when Vinco Ventures more than doubled and Support.com almost tripled. The rallies came as individual investors attempted to pump their bets on Twitter, Reddit’s WallStreetBets and chatrooms on Stocktwits.
Support.com, a little known software firm, has seen its market value soar to $882 million on Monday, while digital media company Vinco Ventures is valued at just over $460 million.
“There’s a lot of randomness that goes into which stocks become meme stocks,” Sahm Adrangi, founder and chief investment officer of Kerrisdale Capital Management, said. “Short squeezes have always been a part of the markets.”
Red-hot rallies for the two stocks continue a trend where heavily-shorted firms surge on high volume as investor chatrooms light up with mentions. While the idea of a short squeeze isn’t new, the phenomenon of meme stocks has captivated investors for the better part of 2021.
Bets against the pair have been gaining traction lately, with 60% of Support.com shares available for trading sold short, data compiled by S3 Partners show. One-fifth of Vinco Ventures stock is currently sold short, with the total short positions for the two stocks at roughly $216 million, the data show.
“With all these stocks, the relative amount of short interest and short selling is very small compared to daily trading volumes,” S3 Partners’ managing director of predictive analytics Ihor Dusaniwsky said. “Therefore the effect of short selling or covering is minimal to their stock price — price moves in these stock are primarily due to long buying and selling.”
While Monday’s surge extended to retail trader favorites like Naked Brand Group and Meta Materials Inc., darlings AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and GameStop Corp. also traded higher.
Here are some other retail-favorites that are seeing notable gains in Monday’s session
AMC Entertainment climbed 6.1%GameStop rose 2.1%Aterian Inc. shares rose 8.9%Meta Materials rallied 7%Naked Brand jumped 8.7%Oragenics Inc. rose 4.7%Hims & Hers Health Inc. added 3.5%The9 Ltd. advanced 5.4%
(Updates share movement, adds comment in seventh paragraph.)
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