Meme stocks wiped out this week during mild market sell-off
Wall Street may have notched its worst day in over a month on Thursday, but one category of assets has fared far worse this week — meme stocks. Major U.S. indexes posted their worst one-day performance since Oct. 10 on Thursday, with the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average losing around 800 points and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropping 2%. The Dow is now poised to end the week with a small gain, while the Nasdaq should finish negative. By comparison, however, more speculative names within an exchange-traded fund focused on meme stocks have been wrecked this week. Roundhill Investments’ Meme Stock ETF (MEME) , which just relaunched last month , was set to end the week with a 12% slump, as of 9:45 a.m. ET Friday. Notable names within the fund include quantum computing companies Rigetti Computing , D-Wave Quantum and IonQ . The tickers were respectively down 43%, 37% and 27% on the week, as of Friday morning. NuScale Power , a popular stock used to play the power generation buildout theme for artificial intelligence data centers, has plummeted 48% this week through Friday morning. Investor Peter Boockvar attributed this sell-off to a broader market pullback within speculative generative AI stocks. He pointed out that Oracle has lost 34% since its September highs of the year, while shares of Meta were trading at their lowest levels since May. “Investors are finally questioning this capex driving into what is still a very uncertain business model of how to monetize all this investment in genAI,” the chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners told CNBC. “Nuclear was part of that trade, quantum sort of piggybacked on top of it with all the excitement there. But the valuations of these stocks got ridiculous.” Part of the reason driving these pullbacks could be investors selling holdings to realize gains before the year’s end, Boockvar added. He accredited the sell-offs seen in other assets, such as gold and silver, to this same trend. “Again, with the catalyst of people questioning this — the Oracle move, the Meta move — investors are giving a thumbs down to all their spending,” he said. “And if they’re going to at some point maybe spend less, then everyone that has benefited from the spend is vulnerable.” Boockvar believes that this overall sell-off within the genAI and data center space could unfortunately have far-reaching ramifications for not only the stock market, but the overall U.S. economy. “It’s very hard to have this be contained when its tentacles reach so far and wide in terms of the S & P ,” he said. “When almost 40% of the S & P is sort of this trade, it’s hard to separate that out. So if that collapsed, it’s hard to believe that the other 60% are somehow going to take the baton and keep markets elevated.”
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