The dip (Steve Russell/Getty Images)

Musk-Trump feud triggers wave of retail dip-buying

A wide range of retail favorites and meme-ish stocks soared Friday, as traders saw no reason for the dust-up between Elon Musk and Donald Trump to dissuade them from their favorite strategy.

Matt Phillips

6/6/25 1:48PM

Some of the most speculative parts of the stock market soared on Friday, as retail traders swamped the market in search of favorites beaten down by Thursday’s dust-up between Elon Musk and President Trump.

Unprofitable tech firms, crypto-adjacent stocks, retail faves, and meme standbys all outperformed broader indexes as everyman traders appeared to embrace a strategy they first adopted during the Covid market collapse of 2020.

Buy the dip!

[image or embed]
— Sandy Parker (@sandyparker.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 5:26 PM

Goldman Sachs’ themed “retail favorites” basket was up 2.1% shortly after 2 p.m. ET, outperforming the S&P and the Nasdaq. Large constituents like Tesla, Palantir, and Robinhood Markets posted impressive gains, but more speculative retail playthings like Rocket Lab, SoundHound AI, and IonQ did even better. (Sherwood News is an editorially independent subsidiary of Robinhood.)

Of course, it’s hard to say with absolute certainty that these gains are being driven solely by individual investors. Professional investors are also trading today.

But it would be consistent with the recent behavior of individual investors, who swallowed hard and snapped up shares of top stocks like Nvidia amid the market’s plunge in April, helping to both put a floor under prices and improve their lagging performance against the market.

For the record, despite their dedication to dip-buying, retail investors are still underperforming the market indexes, JPMorgan analysts say. In a note earlier this week, they estimated that retail portfolios were down 2.6% in 2025 through the end of May, while the S&P 500 had a gain of about 1% over that period.

Matt Phillips6m

Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

Matt Phillips2h

Intel sinks on news it will hang on to networking unit

Intel dropped in early trading Thursday after it disclosed plans to retain ownership of its networking unit following a strategic review of operations.

The unit, known as NEX, makes products like infrastructure processors, which do needed “housekeeping” tasks like running security checks, thereby freeing core Intel CPUs to do the higher-value operations. It also produces switches and controllers that manage and direct the flow of data to CPUs.

Intel Shelves Plans to Sell Networking Division After Review

Luke Kawa2h

Quantum computing stocks soar on return of bullish options bets

The calendar says December, but the price action is starting to look a lot more like September to me:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are all up at least 7% as of 11:04 a.m. ET, buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.

Nearly 50,000 calls in IonQ have already changed hands, well above the 20-day average for a full session, with activity concentrated in strikes from $50 to $55 in contracts that expire between Friday and mid-January. Its put/call ratio is near 0.2, versus an average of over 1 for the past 20 sessions.
More than 65,000 calls have traded in Rigetti, a hair shy of its full 20-day average. Like IonQ, options activity has a bullish tilt, with a put/call ratio of about 0.7 versus a 20-day average of roughly 1.2.
D-Wave, which received positive commentary from Evercore ISI on Wednesday, isn’t seeing call activity as elevated as its peers, but the options action is also very skewed toward the bull side, with a put/call ratio of less than 0.3 versus a 20-session average of 0.7.

Pure-play quantum computing stocks nearly doubled from late August to late September amid heavy options market activity thanks to reports on government support for the sector, M&A activity, tech breakthroughs, and a flurry of price target hikes by Wall Street.

Luke Kawa

Retail traders are killing it this year because of both what they’re buying and when they bought it

Buy the dip. Buy AI. Buy gold.

J. Edward Moreno3h

Hims announces acquisition of Canadian telehealth firm Livewell

Hims & Hers rose in early trading after it announced its acquisition of Livewell, a Canadian telehealth company, marking its official entrance to that market.

The company announced in July that it would expand into Canada by 2026, taking advantage of the patent expiry for semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster GLP-1s, Ozempic and Wegovy. Hims said Thursday that it would do that through an all-cash acquisition of Livewell.

Novo’s patent on semaglutide is set to expire in Canada in January. It would be the first time generics for the blockbuster GLP-1 drugs are available anywhere, and generic drugmaker Sandoz International has already announced plans to make copies of the drug. In the US, Hims sells copycat versions of Novo’s drugs, which has led to conflict between the companies.

On Wednesday, Hims announced that it would purchase YourBio, a device that uses “bladeless microneedles thinner than an eyelash” to collect blood samples, in another all-cash deal. According to its latest quarterly filing, the company had $345.8 million in cash and cash equivalents.