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My Precious

Gold and silver are the new meme stocks

Momentum. Flows. Options activity. Intense retail enthusiasm. It’s all there.

Luke Kawa

The r/WallStreetBets corner of Reddit is one of the places I go — and one of the sources that the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF draws upon — to get a handle on retail trader sentiment.

And right now, it’s showing quite starkly that gold and silver are the new meme stocks.

Momentum. Flows. Options activity. Intense retail enthusiasm. It’s all there. The new shiny toys for traders are the oldest, shiniest perceived stores of value.

Over the past 12 hours, the SPDR Gold Shares ETF and iShares Silver Trust are the two most mentioned and most positively mentioned tickers on the subreddit, per SwaggyStocks.

GLD SLV ticker references on r/WSB
Source: SwaggyStocks

JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain, who tracks retail flows, showed that net buying of commodity ETFs from this cohort were $163.1 million as of 4 p.m. ET on Monday, or in the 98th percentile relative to their one-year history. On Friday, those flows were in the 90th percentile, and nearly in the 80th percentile on Thursday.

The five-day average for call volumes in GLD recently hit a record, while those for its silver peer are at their highest since 2021.

The 14-day relative strength index, a technical gauge of the magnitude and persistence of price movements, is at its highest level since 2020 for the silver ETF. The gold ETF, meanwhile, has seen its 14-day RSI close above 70 (which indicates it’s in “overbought” territory) in all but one of the 30 trading days since the end of August. That’s far and away the highest share of time it’s spent in “overbought” territory over any 30-session stretch since this product was introduced in 2004.

The very underfollowed @VKMacro argued on X that the price performance of gold is an example of flows driving very extreme performance:

Precious metals are normally what you turn to when the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And yet we’re seeing it bid up at the same time that the AI trade remains near all-time highs, zero-revenue nuclear energy company Oklo is ramping, and quantum computing stocks are also on fire.

Once again, the nature of the assets that are seemingly going parabolic suggests to me that we’re in an intense bull market in anti-humanity.

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Roblox surges as a new brainrot game climbs the engagement charts

A game that has players grab “brainrots” like “Aura Farma” and “Rainbow 67” and run away with Tsunamis is climbing the Roblox engagement charts and getting the attention of Wall Street analysts.

Morgan Stanely on Tuesday lowered its price target for Roblox from $170 to $155, but said that the platform’s risks are fully discounted and that it should continue to benefit from hit games. On Monday, BMO Capital directly cited the emergence of one such hit: “Escape Tsunami For Brainrots!”

That title, a top five experience on the gaming platform according to engagement tracking service RoMonitor, averaged more than 40 million visits from Saturday to Monday. Less than a month old, the game has landed just in time, emerging after analysts last month warned that 2025 viral hits like “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot” (yes, it’s different) are past their peaks.

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Nvidia stock shrugs off report that Chinese customers will only be able to buy H200 AI chips “under special circumstances”

The Information is reporting that Chinese customers won’t be able to get their hands on as many Nvidia H200 AI chips as they want.

Per the outlet, the “Chinese government this week told some tech companies it would only approve their purchases of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips under special circumstances, such as for university research and development labs,” citing two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

On December 8, US President Donald Trump said Nvidia would be allowed to sell these chips, the most advanced in its Hopper generation, to China. This was shortly followed by a report from the Financial Times that Chinese regulators were “discussing ways to permit limited access to the H200,” as the world’s second-largest economy has been keen on boosting its domestic chip industry. Last week, Bloomberg reported that “Chinese officials are preparing to allow local companies to buy the component from Nvidia for select commercial use,” with imports beginning “as soon as this quarter.”

Call it information fatigue, because the market doesn’t seem to care about this latest report, with shares making fresh highs for the day not even 10 minutes after this news hit the wires. Or perhaps when it comes to AI development, it’s not hard to come up with “special circumstances” to justify access to powerful chips.

The report adds that Chinese officials have told companies to only buy these chips if “necessary” — without really defining what “necessary” means.

It’s not the first time traders shrugged off reporting from The Information on Nvidia. Shares finished up 1% on January 7, the day the outlet reported that Beijing was suspending purchases of the H200 pending a decision on what the import restrictions would be.

600✈️ < 793✈️

Boeing shares are up more than 2% on Tuesday after the plane maker reported 160 commercial jet deliveries in the fourth quarter, sending its full-year total to 600. That’s a 72% improvement from the company’s disastrous 2024, when it delivered 348 jets amid safety probes and a lengthy strike.

As expected, Boeing was out-delivered by its European rival Airbus for the seventh year in a row. Airbus reported 793 annual commercial handoffs for the year.

Boeing’s 193-jet delivery gap on the year improves on its performance vs. Airbus in 2023, when it delivered 207 fewer jets than its chief competitor.

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Intel jumps to new 52-week high on upgrade

Intel jumped early Tuesday, hitting a 52-week high soon after the open, as Keybanc analysts upgraded the stock to “overweight” and put an above-consensus $60 price target on the shares, suggesting an upside of 25%.

They also upgraded Advanced Micro Devices to “overweight” and put a $270 target on the shares, a ~23% premium from where they’re trading.

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Companies are still facing ransom demands from Oracle’s business software data breach, the WSJ reports

A hack that stole sensitive data in Oracle’s business software — which may have started as early as last July, but wasn’t disclosed by the company until October — is still generating ransom demands, per reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

The number of affected organizations seems to be rising, with executives at Harvard University, Canon USA, Mazda, American Airlines unit Envoy Air, and Logitech all receiving emails demanding millions in exchange for the release of data in recent months.

An online extortion group known as Cl0p had been identified as the source of the breach on Oracle’s E-Business Suite, with the hackers reportedly leveraging a security flaw that did not need any fake or stolen sign-in credentials, and leaving responsible teams “zero-days” to fix the vulnerability. By the time Oracle issued software patches in October to prevent further attacks, more than 100 companies were estimated to be affected by the data breach, per the WSJ.

The number of affected organizations seems to be rising, with executives at Harvard University, Canon USA, Mazda, American Airlines unit Envoy Air, and Logitech all receiving emails demanding millions in exchange for the release of data in recent months.

An online extortion group known as Cl0p had been identified as the source of the breach on Oracle’s E-Business Suite, with the hackers reportedly leveraging a security flaw that did not need any fake or stolen sign-in credentials, and leaving responsible teams “zero-days” to fix the vulnerability. By the time Oracle issued software patches in October to prevent further attacks, more than 100 companies were estimated to be affected by the data breach, per the WSJ.

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