The volatile, speculative momentum trades that have been on fire in recent months are getting smoked.

The SPDR Gold Shares ETF is on track for its biggest daily loss since April 2013, as of 10:28 a.m. ET.

And Goldman Sachs’ baskets of “high beta momentum longs” and “non-profitable tech” stocks, which have pretty much been the exact same line for two months, got dumped last Thursday and are down big again today.

D-Wave Quantum, Planet Labs, and Navitas Semiconductor are some of the stocks that feature in both of Goldman’s baskets and are down more than 2% as of 10:24 a.m. ET.

All of these groups have been handily outperforming the S&P 500 for an extended period of time despite by their very nature having more hype than actual track records — in terms of producing profits for shareholders — to speak of. Gold, obviously, generates no income. Nonprofitable tech stocks aren’t really in a position to spin off cash they don’t have to their owners. And, as mentioned, high-beta momentum and nonprofitable tech stocks have pretty much traded the same!

It’s difficult to pinpoint a fundamental catalyst for why speculative momentum trades suddenly turn on a dime, just as it’s often tricky to identify why they went on such a mammoth run in the first place. Perhaps the onset of earnings season — which gives us the opportunity to assess fundamental progress — means that right now, there’s more attention being paid to “line go up” when it comes to revenues and profits, and that’s taking away from the mindshare on “line go up” with respect to recent share price performance.

Beyond Meat is showing what happens when a low nominal share price, retail enthusiasm, heavy options activity, and relatively elevated short interest collide: this is what a meme stock rally looks like.

Shares of the plant-based meat company are on a tear again on Tuesday morning, pushing toward the $2 level after sinking as low as $0.50 last Thursday. As of 7:39 a.m. ET, more than $115 million has changed hands trading Beyond Meat, the fourth-most of any stock listed on US exchanges.

The rally didn’t need any fundamental news, but it got some anyways: management announced plans to expand its product availability at over 2,000 Walmart locations nationwide, further adding to the stock’s early gains.

This continues Beyond Meat’s high-volume surge that saw the stock more than double on Monday, in what was by far its biggest one-day gain on record. By the time the dust settled on the opening session of the week, Beyond Meat had volumes in excess of 1.2 billion, effectively turning over its (newly boosted) shares outstanding three times over during the course of the day. That’s a higher level of turnover than Opendoor Technologies enjoyed during its most insane session of this year back on July 21.

JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain observed that this retail interest came out of nowhere as the stock was trading for coins rather than dollars, as this chart on BYND’s daily net retail imbalance through Friday shows:

This sudden flood of positive retail sentiment appears to be in no small part thanks to a (since banned) Reddit user with the handle capybaraSTOCKS, who has since transitioned to YouTube and X to share his thesis on the company. Business Insider identified this person as Dimitri Semenikhin, a Dubai-based real estate developer.

The move on Monday included a massive spike in call volumes up to more than triple their previous daily record:

When you’re a meme stock, your equity is what becomes your top product. And while, yes, most companies do tend to see higher trading volumes on any given day than the sales they’re making, this discrepancy is particularly stark with Beyond Meat. Through its history as a publicly traded company, it’s recorded plant-based meat sales of 487.5 million pounds. In other words: more than twice as many shares traded on Monday compared to pounds sold from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025!

IonQ is up in early trading on Tuesday after the quantum computing company shared two technical papers that demonstrate 99.99% two-qubit gate performance.

According to IonQ’s press release, this marks a new “quantum computing world record” for a two-qubit system, topping the previous world record of 99.97% set last year by Oxford Ionics, which IonQ acquired earlier this year. Though 99.99% and 99.97% sound very similar, the former represents an error rate of 1 in 10,000 operations; the latter represents an error rate of 3 in 10,000 operations.

The company says it is the first and only quantum computing company to cross the “four-nines” benchmark, per the release, putting IonQ on track to scale up toward millions of qubits by 2030.

The “two-qubit gate fidelity,” or the error rate of quantum computers’ two-qubit operations, is an important yardstick to measure the performance of a quantum computer. When accuracy improves, the technology’s window for commercial operations widens — a welcome development in the nascent industry, which has been fueled by increased US government interest and speculative trading as much as it has been by technical breakthroughs this year.

In July, peer Rigetti Computing announced that its two-qubit fidelity was 99.5%, catalyzing its largest one-day gain since January. The two companies both operate gate-based models, but with different approaches: Rigetti uses superconducting circuits, while IonQ, as its name implies, uses trapped ions.

In CEO Niccolo de Masi’s words:

“This level of quantum performance has been the industry’s north star for decades and crossing it brings fault-tolerant quantum systems years closer to mass market adoption. For our global customers, it means unlocking more value from quantum computing sooner, while dramatically lowering the cost and complexity of large-scale systems.”

CoreWeave is sinking after one of its earliest backers and top shareholders, Magnetar Financial, sold over $500 million in stock last week.

Filings released after the close on Friday showed the Illinois-based investment firm, its subsidiaries, and executives dumped $486 million from Wednesday through Friday, while separate statements released last Wednesday revealed $60 million in sales from earlier in the week.

After these divestments, Magnetar and its affiliated parties still own north of 72 million shares of the neocloud company.

Magnetar previously put on what looked to be a massive collar trade that protected the value of its CoreWeave position through mid-March of next year by selling calls with strike prices of $160 and $175 and buying put options with a strike price of $70. There were no derivative transactions reported along with any of last week’s sales.

In late March, Magnetar senior managing partner David Snyderman called CoreWeave “the gold standard now for AI infrastructure” and told Bloomberg that the firm had not used the IPO as an opportunity to reduce its stake. Synderman was among the Magnetar-affiliated parties that reduced their positions last week.

Fuel-cell-based power provider Bloom Energy jumped Monday after analysts at Bank of America and RBC Capital published somewhat contradictory commentary on the shares.

In its note, BofA said the company’s “new Brookfield partnership adds a blue-chip counterparty and reinforces its position at the center of the AI-driven power-resiliency build-out.”

But BofA analysts still rate the stock an “underperform,” citing “aggressive market assumptions” about the rate at which its recent announcements of partnerships and memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with potential data center clients, including Oracle, can be converted into actual revenue that justify the market’s assumptions about the coming years. They wrote:

“Bloom Energy would need to convert nearly all announced MOUs, accelerate project execution, and sustain 20%+ incremental margins, a steep execution curve for a company that has only recently achieved low-double-digit EBITDA margins. To reach 2030 levels, the company would need to achieve nearly double those deployments annually. The current valuation, in our view, already reflects this ‘blue sky’ scenario.”

And while BofA did raise its price target for the shares to $26 from $24, that’s roughly 80% below where the stock now trades.

Analysts at RBC, however, were much more sanguine about the prospects for the company. In a note published over the weekend, they raised their price target to $123 from $75, suggesting that the market seems to be pricing only a relatively modest part of the potential opportunity for Bloom represented by so-called behind-the-meter (BTM) data centers. (Those are data centers that have their own dedicated on-site power generation.) They wrote:

“We believe the upside opportunity continues to skew favorably on a growing BTM datacenter opportunity that we believe is still in the early stages. We acknowledge the competitive dynamics, but point to the recent partnership announcement with Brookfield as another proof point for the competitiveness of BE’s solution. We believe shares are priced for an incremental capacity increase which we think is supported by a large and growing TAM [total addressable market] opportunity.”

Grail, a cancer detection biotech, rose more than 20% after it announced that it raised $325 million from a slate of investors including Hims & Hers.

Grail sells a blood test that detects cancerous tumors early on. The company also announced encouraging trial results for its flagship test, Galleri, on Friday.

Grail sold 4,639,543 shares at $70.05, a discount from the $78 closing price on Friday, to a group of more than six investors. Hims did not immediately respond to questions from Sherwood News, including how much of the $325 million fundraise it contributed. Grail announced last week that it received a $110 million investment from Samsung.

Grail reported $67.4 million in revenue in the first half of this year, up from $58.6 million in the same period in 2024. Galleri is available commercially but is pending approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which could position it to be covered by major insurers.

Shares of adtech company AppLovin are on their back foot to open the week on the heels of a report from the New York Post that “state regulators, including staff from the attorneys general from Delaware, Oregon and Connecticut, have reached out to multiple short sellers, seemingly as part of a preliminary investigation.”

AppLovin told the Post that it is “not engaged in any investigations with any state attorneys general regarding its business; nor has the Company been contacted by any state attorneys general regarding any such alleged investigation.”

AppLovin got whacked earlier this month after Bloomberg reported that its data collection practices are the subject of an SEC probe. While they initially bounced after Wall Street suggested selling in response to the news was overdone, they’ve since proceeded to hit fresh lows even after AppLovin said that it had shut down software that short sellers alleged was responsible for installing apps on users’ phones without their permission.

Morgan Stanley analysts raised their price target on Opendoor Technologies to the highest on Wall Street. However... they’re still not actually bullish on the online real estate company.

In a wide-ranging note on internet stocks as the Q3 earnings season heats up, analysts Brian Nowak and Matthew Cost (who covers Opendoor) wrote:

“While we see limited fundamental justification for OPEN’s recent outperformance, we also see the opportunity for a pivot back to home-buying (and significant operating leverage) should there be a stronger housing market recovery. Moreover, similar situations with other stocks have shown that higher valuations are not only often more sustainable than expected, but also create the opportunity for companies to raise capital and address challenges with the support of an enthusiastic shareholder base. With that in mind we mark our base case price target to market at $6.”

Morgan Stanley’s previous price target was $2. Analysts kept their “market perform” (or “hold”) rating on the company intact.

The obvious corollary here is GameStop, a company that has had a high value ascribed to the value of its cash based on the idea that CEO Ryan Cohen would be able to do a lot to transform the company with that money. Opendoor bulls are similarly enthused by the company’s turnaround prospects under its new management. Its biggest one-day gain on record came after news that cofounders Keith Rabois and Eric Wu were being added to the board of directors and that Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian was coming in to serve as CEO.

GameStop, without doing anything too revolutionary, has managed to turn around its business since its initial run as a meme stock, and has now strung together five consecutive quarters of positive operating cash flows for the first time in its history.

The sell side is pretty downbeat on Opendoor, with just one “buy” (or “buy” equivalent), five “hold,” and five “sell” ratings among analysts tracked by Bloomberg.

Moderna rose more than 5% on Monday after a new study showed that mRNA COVID-19 shots could enhance cancer immunotherapy.

The results were presented by researchers from MD Anderson Cancer Center at the European Society for Medical Oncology conference in Berlin on Sunday, Stat News and others reported. The study found that cancer patients who took the COVID-19 shot within 100 days of taking an immunotherapy drug lived longer.

Moderna was tapped by the first Trump administration alongside Pfizer to quickly develop an immunization for Covid in 2020. Moderna still makes nearly all of its revenue from the vaccine while Pfizer has a larger, more diversified portfolio. Moderna has other products in its pipeline, including a dual flu and COVID-19 vaccine and personalized cancer vaccines.

Apple is trading at an intraday all-time high stock price of $263.50 as of 11:45 am EST, after an upgrade from Loop Capital to a Street high price target of $315 and following positive sales growth indicators for its iPhone 17.

Apple’s all-time close was $259.02 on December 24, 2024, the same day as its last intraday high. Analysts expect iPhone revenue to return to growth this year and next.