00:00 Brian Sozzi

Beyond Meat is having another meme stock moment, despite the fundamentals of its business being less than as sizzling as a plant-based burger right off the grill. Love that burger though.

00:09 Brian Sozzi

Shares of the struggling foe meat maker have gained close to 600% in the past three trading sessions. Gains looked poised to continue on Wednesday with shares up as much as 135% at one point in pre-market trading. So it’s just a wild move here.

00:22 Brian Sozzi

You can see here in one of Yahoo Finance’s new community tools, how interest in Beyond Meat has spiked in the last few sessions amongst retail investors. But to all those meme masters pushing up the stock, I just want to remind you, Beyond Meat sales are plunging.

00:32 Brian Sozzi

It’s posting big operating losses, and all indications suggest the size of the plant-based meat market are not panning out to be as big as once believed. Still here on the Open roundtable, Art Hogan, Ali Canal, and Inez Ferre. Art, I’m I’m going back to you, Art. Uh, any interest in trading a Beyond Meat here?

00:50 Art Hogan

None whatsoever. It’s stock went down from $175 at its peak to less than a dollar where it sat for the better part of the last year.

00:59 Art Hogan

Getting a bump now in a short squeeze, I just think it’s dangerous and and it’s not something I would play.

01:03 Brian Sozzi

What do you think drives these meme type moves? I mean, that you could very easily pull up a free financial statement on our platform, SEC.gov. You can see that Beyond Meat ain’t making money. Sales are declining double digits. The market’s pressure. Like, what what’s the psychology behind these moves, Art?

01:21 Art Hogan

Well, it’s it’s a classic short squeeze, but it’s done by a gang, right? So you get the the gang of uh of uh investors together, they they target one, two, three stocks, three that you mentioned and Krispy Kreme and 1-800 Flowers another one.

01:34 Art Hogan

You know, they’re all reading the same information, diving in at the same time. and when you have a 64, 65% short position, pretty easy to see that short squeeze happened, but it doesn’t end well at the end of the day. We saw this three years ago. The only way to benefit from this as a company is to already have an ATM set up, meaning you can sell shares into this mania. and maybe with that capital that you raise, you can reinvent your business model and make it work. But to your point, I just don’t know what the total ble market is for things like Beyond Meat and and plant-based uh,

02:00 Art Hogan

uh, alternatives.

02:01 Brian Sozzi

And now, you know what amazes me, these moves and these meme stock, they meme stocks, they come out of the blue. Uh, one day these stocks are getting hammered. just a week and a half ago, Beyond Meat was trading about 56 cents. Uh, they were doing a a pretty large debt swap deal. People hated the stock. Today, I it’s up what? almost over 600% in three past three sessions. I mean it’s wild.

02:22 Inez Ferre

And I remember when this stock went public on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange back in 2019, and the stock went to a high of above $200 per share. You heard that right. It was above $200 per share. And you now are seeing that the stock is around $6 per share. Okay, today it’s seeing a huge bump. Yes, because of that short squeeze that you’re seeing on it. The short interest is above about 60% as was noted.

02:51 Inez Ferre

But look, uh, certainly, yeah, these are stocks that are they they end up becoming casino stocks. I mean, it it is just you are basically betting on it. It’s not necessarily the fundamentals, it’s not necessarily uh, the the strategy shifts, but it’s it’s mostly just a casino stock at this point.

03:13 Brian Sozzi

Well said and as, all right, let me go back to you real quick. Uh, is there when you see this type of activity behind me, Krispy Kreme and some other ones that are moving on uh on the Alpha finance platform, just these big meme stocks, is it an indication to you that the broader market may be near some form of top? Like investors are searching for that last grasp of the bull market here and trading up stocks like this that are horribly uh fundamentally positioned?

03:40 Art Hogan

Yeah, I I I think that we always try to ascribe some sort of larger meaning to any of the manias that we go through and certainly the meme stocks are the latest of those, but we’re we’re also seeing that in some of the, um, drone stocks and the nuclear stocks and the lithium mining stocks and the independent energy stocks and you know, there’s all sorts of things on the speculative edge that are going to be there. I don’t think you you you you have to actually say, well, this means that the S&P 500 has run out of steam and and and everyone’s looking somewhere else.

04:09 Art Hogan

The group that is doing this is much smaller than the broader market.

04:11 Brian Sozzi

And as, you know, uh, lastly, one stock that is no longer a meme stock is Robin Hood. Like Robin Hood has turned into, I mean, they helped drive that last meme movement, but they have this is a company that’s completely transformed really over the past five years. Totally different company.

04:28 Inez Ferre

It’s huge. It’s it’s explosive what uh has happened to that stock and what they’re really doing with the tools that they’re giving the retail investors, uh the prediction markets that has absolutely sword. That is a soaring part of the industry. and uh all these uh tools that that that now retail investors have at their disposal, tokenization that they’re getting into. I mean, this is the reason why you have seen this stock become a total high flyer.

04:55 Brian Sozzi

Yeah, I’m totally jazzed to speak with uh Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robin Hood at our Invest conference. That’s going to be a fun