The latest retail stock darling is up 3,500% this week – but down 99.9% from its peak

Depending on how you look at it, this retail meme stock moment is either winding down or going back to its roots.

GameStop and AMC are both down about 30-40% over the past two sessions, as of 1pm ET. But in its most basic (or base) form, isn’t the retail frenzy less about a select handful of stocks and more about finding a heavily-shorted company with a somewhat interesting narrative that trades at a very low nominal price, then buying the shares like crazy?

Enter Faraday Future Intelligent Electric, a self-described “global shared intelligent electric mobility ecosystem company.” The stock is up about 150% on the day – a very moving target – and 3,500% on the week, as of 1pm ET.

Some fun facts about the firm:

• The company hasn’t filed quarterly financials since November 13 (more than six months ago).

• Those numbers weren’t too bright, showing operating losses of $66 million for the three months ending September 30, 2023.

• The Nasdaq announced plans to delist the stock (because the price was too low, even after a number of reverse splits), and...

• There appears to be some palace intrigue in the form of a public leadership struggle.

But! In this world, that pesky set of facts must be balanced against these two:

• The stock was trading below 5 cents per share coming into this week.

• Short interest as a percent of float was nearly 90% as of April 30, per exchange data.
  

For those reasons, it’s a name you currently see actively being promoted on various i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ trading-related subreddits, as well as the Wall Street Bets chat on Telegram.

Unlike GME and AMC – where this bout of market mania appears to be a faint echo of what transpired three years ago, in price performance and activity — FFIE is the exact opposite.

Faraday did get some love in the 2021 frenzy — the stock nearly doubled in January. But that pales compared to the parabolic moves in GME and AMC that month. And those moves, in turn, have nothing on what’s happening in FFIE this week. (Yes, yes, I know, it is easier for small number to go up by more than slightly-less-small number over a short period of time).

But the real kicker is in the activity: In late January 2021, the value traded in the stock exceeded $286 million. Now it’s down 99.9% from that level — and the value of the stock traded through 1pm today reached $980 million!

Wild.