Pot Stocks Are Getting Crushed. What You Need to Know.

What goes up, must come down. But not necessarily this fast.

Canadian marijuana stocks that posted staggering gains on Wednesday fell just as fast Thursday, while U.S. multistate operators, or MSOs, were dragged down, but fared a bit better.

Tilray stock (ticker: TLRY) fell 49.7% Thursday, erasing all its gains from the prior trading day. Aphria stock (APHA) closed down 35.8%. Those companies expect to close a merger in the first half of the year. Under the deal announced in December, an investor would receive about 0.84 shares of the combined Tilray for every share of Aphria that they owned. Aurora Cannabis shares (ACB) were down 23.5%, while Canopy Growth (CGC) fell 22.1%.

ETFMG Alternative Harvest (MJ), an exchange-traded fund with exposure to the pot business, fell 24.6% from its Wednesday close. The ETF is still up about 74.5% year-to-date.

Meanwhile, Curaleaf (CURLF), a U.S. operator that lists shares over-the-counter in the U.S., fell 7.2%. Peers Green Thumb Industries (GTBIF), Cresco Labs (CRLBF), and Trulieve Cannabis (TCNNF) were down between 6% and 8%.

Canadian pot stocks, especially, have rallied in recent months on a wave of sentiment-driven gains as investors bet on positive political developments. Meanwhile, U.S. growers, which would benefit from an improved legal landscape, have lagged their competitors that operate in the smaller Canadian market.

Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Pablo Zuanic told Barron’s in an email that the recent action in pot stocks involving Reddit traders makes it hard to predict day-to-day moves, especially with the more-liquid Canadian growers.

“A look at the [GameStop] stock chart should be cautionary,” Zuanic added. “That said, we continue to think the top US MSOs are attractively valued taking a long-term view, even though they will get some of the Canadian downdraft.”

Ironically, some observers last month likened the move in GameStop (GME) to Tilray’s brief parabolic jump in 2018. The WallStreetBets forum on Reddit was recently littered with posts about pot stocks. One of the top posts Thursday morning likened the recent action in Canadian pot stocks to a casino.

Zuanic said on Wednesday that the gap in performance between U.S. and Canadian licensed producers, or LPs, could signal interest from the Robinhood crowd. Robinhood users can’t trade over-the-counter stocks on the platform.

“Sure, the news flow backdrop has also helped (the notion the US will open soon and Canadian LPs will benefit; news about exports), but we think this does not explain the big delta in Canada vs. US performance,” he said. “We wonder if the average RH retail investor knows the difference between an MSO and an LP, and the very different fundamentals of both cannabis markets.”

Ihor Dusaniwsky, a managing director at short-selling analytics firm S3 Partners, noted on Wednesday that there’s also a short-selling angle at play. Tilray began the year with short interest at about 48% of shares available for trading, according to S3 Partners. S3 estimates a recent short interest at 23% of shares available for trading, implying a large amount of covering, which helps drive prices up.

Short sellers sell borrowed shares with the hope they can replace the stock by purchasing it at a lower price. Dusaniwsky notes that Tilray and Cronos (CRON) saw the largest yearly decrease in short interest as a percentage of shares available for trading. He added that the top 20 cannabis shorts in the sector were down $4.32 billion in net-of-financing mark-to-market losses in 2021 by Wednesday.

“The yearlong rally has spurred short squeezes in most of the top 20 most shorted stocks in the sector and we should see the squeezes continuing, especially if the potential for nationwide U.S. cannabis legalization continues to increase,” Dusaniwsky added.

As with GameStop, the traditional buy-and-hold investor might want to stay away until things cool down.

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

Pot Stocks Are Getting Crushed. What You Need to Know.

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.