Speculative stocks rebound from early sell-off
As we head toward the last hour of a wild week of trading, the buckle-up vibes the market started out with Friday have mellowed into a modestly positive day, with the Invesco QQQ Trust and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF both in the green.
But the volatility was pretty wild for some of the high-beta momentum stocks that have taken some of the worst beatings in recent days.
Shares like Applied Digital and Bloom Energy saw cumulative swings on the day along the lines of 20 percentage points. Even those that haven’t quite managed to stay positive, like IREN and Oklo, have nonetheless erased sizable losses.
Why? Frankly, it’s impossible to say. The same uncertainties that the market was facing yesterday — doubts about further rate hikes, confusion about the state of the economy, jitters about the potential for the AI boom to turn into a bust — are still hovering out there somewhere. Perhaps it will take more than a 2-percentage point drop from record highs for the major indexes — about the extent of the recent sell-off — to dull the retail reflex to buy the dip.
