Beyond Meat's stock soared for the third straight day on Wednesday, fueled by a surge of interest from meme traders. The plant-based meat company's shares skyrocketed as much as 111% in premarket trading and is up 62% to $5.87 at the time of this writing. This gives it a four-day rally of nearly 1300%, reports Bloomberg, including a 127% jump on Monday after Roundhill Investments added Beyond Meat to its Meme Stock ETF.
Tuesday brought another record leap, with shares spiking 146% after the company revealed it would expand distribution at Walmart. Despite this week's rally, Beyond Meat's overall trajectory has been grim. The stock, which topped $230 after its 2019 IPO, has languished for years, losing 47% in 2021, 81% in 2022, 27% in 2023, and 57% in 2024, per CNBC. Just last week, the stock fell to 52 cents on Thursday, on the heels of a finalized debt deal in which it swapped nearly $1 billion in convertible notes due in 2027 for 316 million new shares and an additional $200 million in notes set to convert in 2030.
As trader Dimitri Semenikhin (Capybara Stocks on YouTube and Reddit) told Business Insider, he scooped up 4% of the company's shares and has argued Beyond Meat's issuance of new stock should be viewed as a bullish development, as it significantly strengthened Beyond Meat's financial position and set the stage for a short squeeze. The Motley Fool is more bearish, writing, "The tender offer looks like a desperate move, as the company would have almost certainly been unable to repay those notes, which were due in 2027. Converting them to stock eliminates that debt and gives lenders something, rather than the pennies on the dollar they likely would've gotten in a bankruptcy."