Meme stock soared during the early hours of the trading session on Wednesday as investors once again jumped into speculative trading amid an overall choppy market.
Shares of Beyond Meat (BYND) rose more than 95% Wednesday morning before paring gains. Krispy Kreme (DNUT) and GoPro (GPRO) are up more than 20% and more than 14%, respectively.
“This is a throwback to 2021 — the environment of hope, dreams, themes and memes that we were going through in that time period,” said Matt Stucky, chief equity portfolio manager at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management.
Beyond Meat, one of the newest entrants to the meme stock market, is up more than 900% in the last five days. The meat alternatives company announced Tuesday an agreement with Walmart (WMT) that will expand the distribution of Beyond Meat products in all of the large chain’s stores.
The stock was also added to the newly relaunched Roundhill Investments MEME ETF (MEME) on Tuesday, sparking a round of retail buying frenzy.
Retail traders bought nearly $35 million worth of Beyond Meat shares on Tuesday, recording the largest single-day share purchase to date, according to data from Vanda Research cited by Reuters.
“(The rush into meme stocks) has really been driven by, you know, these kinds of opportunities or, in my opinion, risks in the market where companies that don’t have positive earnings, maybe they’re losing money, really led the markets higher over the last 12 months… It’s a type of speculative risk that’s starting to build up in the markets,” Stucky said.
The stock has also sparked intense short-term interest. As of Wednesday morning, Beyond Meat had a short float of more than 64%, according to FINVIZ data, meaning more than half of the company’s outstanding shares have been used to bet on a drop in price—strong conditions for a short squeeze, the favorite of retail meme stock trading.
Krispy Kreme, which had its biggest day of stock buying since July, according to Vanda Research, and GoPro had short interest of 30% and 13%, respectively.
Opendoor Technologies (OPEN), perhaps the biggest meme stock of the year, fell more than 8% Wednesday morning. The stock is up nearly 300% since the start of 2025, as hedge fund manager Eric Jackson has waged a sustained campaign to drive the price up.
Roundhill Investments announced earlier this month that it will restart its MEME ETF after closing the fund in 2023. The ETF is down more than 17% in recent days and lost 5% on Wednesday.
Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US stocks for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.