The BlackBerry Rally Fizzles. Other Meme Stocks Slide, Too.

Text measurement

The successful streak for

BlackBerry

inventory appears to be out of steam.

After running up 85% in six weeks, shares of BlackBerry (ticker: BB) are succumbing to the downward slide in so-called meme shares fashionable with buyers on the Wall Street Bets channel on the social media platform Reddit.

On Friday, the inventory was off 12% to $14.03, and traded as little as $13.76. Trading quantity has cooled as properly. With lower than 90 minutes left within the buying and selling day, quantity stood at 150 million shares, falling again from the report every day turnover of 534.6 million shares on Thursday. For the week, the inventory has traded 1.1 billion shares, equal to roughly twice BlackBerry’s 566 million shares excellent.

This is the second time in 2021 that buyers have aggressively bid up BlackBerry shares. In the primary 4 weeks of January, the inventory almost quadrupled, hitting a 10-year excessive at near $29 earlier than falling again to single digits in latest weeks.

Once a extremely profitable cell phone firm, BlackBerry has moved on —apart from licensing its patent portfolio. BlackBerry is now primarily a software program firm. Its QNX real-time working system software program is utilized in cars, medical gadgets, and different merchandise. And it affords endpoint safety safety software program.

But the tug of struggle within the inventory doesn’t appear to have a lot to do with the corporate’s fundamentals.

Other meme shares had been additionally sporting modest losses. For instance, each

GameStop

(GME) and AMC (AMC) had been down about 3%, Bed Bath & Beyond (BBY) was off 2% and Express (EXPR) was 5% decrease.

Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com