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POET Technologies is the newest low-price stock seeing record volumes and call activity thanks to retail traders

The optical communications tech company spiked Tuesday and is well on its way to another big gain on Wednesday.

10/8/25 9:36AM

POET Technologies is the new shiny toy for retail traders.

The company, whose optical communication tech aims to speed data transmission in AI data centers, soared 23% on Tuesday amid record volumes and call option volumes after announcing it raised $75 million from a single institutional investor through the sale of stock and warrants.

Shares are surging again in early trading on Wednesday, seemingly poised to break both of Tuesday’s aforementioned volume records.

It’s the most mentioned and most positively mentioned ticker on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets over the past 24 hours, per SwaggyStocks.

WSB Top Trending Stocks — Source: SwaggyStocks

“The massive growth of AI infrastructure represents an unprecedented opportunity for which POET is well prepared,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, executive chairman and chief executive officer. “With a war chest of over $150 million in cash and no significant debt, we are now able to scale up our own growth ambitions in the market for advanced AI hardware solutions.”

Traders are seemingly eager to bet on the company’s short- and long-term upside via options:

The 10 most popular options contracts traded on Tuesday were all calls, some of which expire as soon as this Friday while others stretch out all the way to January 2028.

All the ingredients for a meme stock are here: r/WSB love, a long history that’s seen the shares trade above $25 at their peak, ties to a buzzy industry, and high options activity.

Tripleheavn WSB POET thesis — Source: r/WallStreetBets via tripleheavn

Matt Phillips2h

DraftKings moves to counter prediction market threat

DraftKings rose after hours, following news that it is buying Railbird in an effort to address the competitive threat from prediction markets that has weighed on its share price — and that of FanDuel parent Flutter Entertainment — for weeks.

The deal is then latest example of the increasing linkages and overlap between worlds of financial markets, gambling, and prediction markets.

Earlier this month, ICE — the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and the ICE futures markets, among others — announced it would invest up to $2 billion in prediction markets company Polymarket.

And Robinhood shares have recently gotten a lift from its ongoing partnership with prediction market platform Kalshi, which has seen growing uptake of its events contracts that allow buyers to take positions on football games.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

By and large investor excitement over prediction markets — which has picked up since the start of football season — has seemed to come at the expense of Flutter and DraftKings, the two companies that dominate US sports betting.

Over the last three months through the end of regular trading on Wednesday, DraftKings and Flutter were down 23% and 18%, respectively, while the S&P 500 is up about 7%.

DraftKings acquires predictions platform Railbird

The deal is then latest example of the increasing linkages and overlap between worlds of financial markets, gambling, and prediction markets.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

Over the last three months through the end of regular trading on Wednesday, DraftKings and Flutter were down 23% and 18%, respectively, while the S&P 500 is up about 7%.

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As Netflix drops on earnings miss, it’s investing just $0.40 into content for every $1 of revenue

Netflix shares fell in after-hours trading on Tuesday, following the release of the streamer’s third-quarter earnings report.

Toby Bochan, Luke Kawa

US stocks go nowhere amid big rotation out of gold and into fake meat

The calmest session for the S&P 500 in over a month.

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OpenAI releases Chrome-competitor browser “ChatGPT Atlas,” sending Google shares down

ChatGPT currently poses little threat to Google’s search business, but an OpenAI browser — and the data that comes with it — could change everything.

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The no-fundamentals, high-volatility winning trades are reversing hard

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.

POET Technologies is the newest low-price stock seeing record volumes and call activity thanks to retail traders

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