Retail traders’ favorite risky, speculative stocks are getting taken to the woodshed

Call it the spec wreck.

Speculative pockets of the market, featuring companies with no to low revenues, are getting clobbered on Thursday.

There’s no material news driving the price action in these groups, which have very different business models but a thing or two in common: most are names that retail traders love and/or had displayed strong positive price momentum that now seems to have flipped on its head. In other words, they’re stocks with common owners, and that has given them common cause to act alike.

In quantum computing, sentiment continues to sour on the pure-play names in the space, with Rigetti Computing off double digits and D-Wave Quantum, IonQ, and Quantum Computing also sharply lower. Per SwaggyStocks, negative references to Rigetti have been running hotter than positive mentions on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit for three consecutive days now. Twice as many puts have traded on Rigetti versus calls through 1:56 pm. ET.

It’s the same story in the crypto-adjacent space, where Riot and MARA Holdings are getting walloped.

Zero-revenue Oklo, whose market cap recently exceeded that of alternative energy giant First Solar, has been hammered, along with peer NuScale. Oklo’s put/call ratio had been averaging about 0.8 over the prior 10 sessions; that’s up to about 1 today.

Cipher Digital and IREN, the crypto-miner-turned-data-center duo, are each seeing elevated selling pressure.

Unfortunately, there’s no turning to pot stocks to blunt the pain: Tilray and Canopy Growth are both off more than 5%, too.

This broad speculative pain is short sellers’ gain, as many of these stocks have high levels of short interest in light of their unproven business models and elevated valuations. A Goldman Sachs basket of the most shorted companies in the Russell 3000 is down more than 3% as of 2 p.m. ET.