Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum (Business Wire)

Hims is cozying up to retail investors

CEO Andrew Dudum and his company are engaging more and more with everyday investors. Meanwhile, more analysts on Wall Street who typically inform institutional investors see the company as a sell.

J. Edward Moreno

8/15/25 8:31AM

On August 10, a retail trader on X tagged Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum in a post saying they would “buy all in your stock” if he responded “hello.”

Dudum obliged:

“hello”
— andrewdudum (@AndrewDudum) August 10, 2025

The same day, the CEO replied to a Hims & Hers customer who was complaining about his gummies melting during shipping. “On it. What state?” Dudum wrote in response to the customer, whose bio says they’re “just a long term investor in high growth stocks with personal opinions.” A few hours later, the customer posted that Dudum’s responsiveness “has sold me on $HIMS stock. I’ll be investing tomorrow.”

Hims has emerged as a darling among retail investors, in part because its stock is volatile and the company frequently makes market-moving news. Dudum told Sherwood News earlier this year that he believes Hims retail investors are likely people who have used the service and had good experiences with it.

“That’s one of the beautiful parts of our business in the public markets,” he said at the time. “People who know the product, who know the service, who have experienced it and have been empowered by it and feeling better, those are the people going and buying shares of the stock. It’s actually just that they love the product.”

Hims stock has swung wildly this year, trading as high as nearly $70 and as low as just over $25. As some Wall Street analysts have become more bearish on the stock — three of the 16 analysts covering Hims have a “sell” rating on the stock, compared to none a year ago — Hims has leaned even more into the retail-investing community.

Dudum recently thanked Hims House, a bullish daily blog for the company’s retail investors, after it wished him a happy birthday. He responded with a laughing emoji to an investor’s post speculating that hormone treatments would launch that week. The post was paired with a GIF of a marmot screaming “ANDREW,” which has become a staple among Hims investors online.

When $HIMS announces TRT & Menopause launch dates this week, will you believe then?@AndrewDudum, it's time. pic.twitter.com/ZjeGDbepOr
— NightHawk Capital (@NighthawkTradez) July 13, 2025

This year, the company started regularly taking questions during earnings calls from Hims House. The blog first submitted questions in Q3 2024, but the company didn’t take them, said Jonathan Stern, who authors the blog. As retail interest grew, the company began asking Hims House for questions when it reported Q4 earnings in February, Stern said. Hims has answered questions from Hims House during the two earnings calls since.

Dudum opened things up even more broadly earlier this month, soliciting questions for the earnings call from the retail community on X days before Hims’ earnings report.

The company also sends press statements to Hims House, which are typically telegraphed in full on X. On Thursday, after Bloomberg reported that the FTC was still probing Hims, they did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg (or Sherwood) but sent a statement to Hims House.

While Dudum is busy embracing his investor community, his family trust has sold some of its shares in the company. Filings show that the trust sold 660,000 shares of Hims stock for $33.5 million last week, marking the largest open-market insider sale of Hims stock since the company went public in 2021.

A spokesperson for the company said Dudum remains the company’s largest shareholder and is “committed to the company’s long-term growth.” The spokesperson added, “The referenced sales were indirectly associated with Mr. Dudum, outside of his personal holdings, for tax and philanthropic purposes.”

It’s not uncommon for CEOs to embrace retail investors, especially if they’re bullish and less critical than analysts from the Street. Perhaps the most prominent example is Palantir and its CEO, Alex Karp.

Allen & Company Annual Conference Draws Media And Tech Leaders To Sun Valley — Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Palantir has cultivated one of Wall Street’s most devoted retail followings through frequent, bite-sized announcements and direct engagement from the company’s social media accounts. Hims does this as well, teasing the launch of Hers gummies and dropping hints of potential partnerships via X.

Like Hims, Palantir also takes questions from retail investors on its earnings calls. Karp hasn’t hidden his disdain for Wall Street analysts, who he says underestimate the company.

At the end of Palantir’s most recent earnings call on August 4, Karp gave a message to retail investors: “Maybe stop talking to all the haters. They’re suffering.”

Hims didn't respond to questions for this article as of publication.

Nia Warfield

Kenvue plunges after reports suggest RFK Jr. may try to link prenatal Tylenol use to autism

Kenvue sank 15% Friday after a WSJ report said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may attempt to link prenatal Tylenol use to autism in an upcoming government report.

Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol and formerly a division of Johnson & Johnson prior to a 2023 spin-out, pushed back, saying the science shows “no causal link” between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism, and pointed to FDA and medical groups that agree on the drug’s safety.

The FDA itself has found no “clear evidence” of harm but advises pregnant women to consult providers before taking OTC meds.

The report is also expected to float a folate-derived therapy as a potential treatment.

Tylenol is just the latest well-established medication to face scrutiny under Kennedy, who has already stirred controversy by reshaping vaccine policy and amplifying doubts about mRNA shots.

Kenvue shares are now down over 18% year-to-date.

RFK Jr., HHS to Link Autism to Tylenol Use in Pregnancy and Folate Deficiencies

The FDA itself has found no “clear evidence” of harm but advises pregnant women to consult providers before taking OTC meds.

The report is also expected to float a folate-derived therapy as a potential treatment.

Tylenol is just the latest well-established medication to face scrutiny under Kennedy, who has already stirred controversy by reshaping vaccine policy and amplifying doubts about mRNA shots.

Kenvue shares are now down over 18% year-to-date.

Max Knoblauch

Lucid surges following 6 days of losses after headlines misidentify Cantor Fitzgerald’s lower split-adjusted price target as a good thing

It’s been a shortened week, but still a rough one for Lucid. Investor blowback to the luxury EV maker’s 1-for-10 reverse stock split has sent shares to all time lows this week.

After six straight days of closing lower, Wall Street appears to have decided enough is enough and is loading up on Lucid shares on Friday, sending them up 13% in recent trading. As of 2:10pm eastern, Lucid trading volumes were at more than 240% of their 30 day average.

Some of the move could be attributed to traders reading headlines that don’t take into consideration Lucid’s reverse split. Cantor Fitzgerald on Friday slapped a new price target on Lucid of $20, compared to its previous target of $3. Some news outlets (not us!) presented that as an increase. The problem: With the 1-for-10 reverse split in effect, a comparable price target would have been $30. The new $20 target is actually... a cut.

Matt Phillips

Palantir slips under 50-day moving average, amid momo reversal

What goes up, doesn’t always keep going up.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp PLTR insane valuation

Matt Phillips

Momentum stocks reverse, weighing on US markets

Momentum stocks dragged the market lower Friday, with stocks like Palantir Technologies, SoundHound AI, Rocket Lab, Robinhood Markets, and GE Vernova continuing a recent slide.

(Robinhood Markets, Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)

The iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF opened 1% higher and built on those gains before reversing hard early in the session to trade 1% lower as of 11 a.m. ET.

If it closes at these levels, this fund that holds US stocks with the best risk-adjusted trailing returns will have completed a so-called “bearish engulfing candle pattern.” As the name suggests is, this is considered to be a negative technical signal that occurs when, the day after a security rises, it ends up opening above the previous day’s closing price and closes below the previous day’s opening price.

Luke Kawa

US stocks rise as soft job growth fortifies bets on a Federal Reserve rate cut this month

ETFs that track major US stock indexes are higher and short-term yields are falling after the August jobs report continued to confirm the trend of labor market cooling, calcifying bets on a Federal Reserve rate cut this month.

Non-farm payrolls rose by just 22,000 in August, while economists had expected an addition of 75,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, in line with estimates. Revisions to the past two months were also negative, but not as severe as in the July report.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF was up 0.3% to session highs in the minutes following the release, while two-year US Treasury yields fell below 3.5%.

A report and market reaction like this suggests traders are embracing the idea that the softening in the US labor market is primarily driven by supply-side factors in light of major changes to net immigration, as recently argued by economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, and isn’t a worrying sign that the US economy is on the verge of a recession.

With revisions, June’s non-farm payroll growth is now -13,000. That’s the first month of net job losses since December 2020. And the underemployment rate (or U6, which includes the unemployed, those employed part time who want a full-time job, and those who want a job but aren’t looking for one currently) rose to 8.1%, its highest level since October 2021.

Some see this data as much more concerning than the market reaction implies.

“Since a month or two ago, policy hawks, growth bulls (I call them wrong), have been arguing two things. First, sequential growth should perk up because the weakness in the summer was all a function of uncertainty around Liberation Day. Second, focus on the ratios because the unemployment rate is still low,” Neil Dutta, head of US economics at Renaissance Macro Research, wrote. “Both of these views were wrong as we now know. Employment growth is still cooling (there is no uptick in hours either) and the unemployment rate is rising. Bye Felicia!”