Where’s the Beef? Meme Stock Traders Send Beyond Meat Shares Soaring

Echoes of 2021 continue to reverberate in 2025, as meme traders on Reddit and elsewhere seemingly pick stocks at random for a moon shot. This time around, it’s Beyond Meat (BYND) stock that’s taking short sellers to the cleaners.

After touching down on $0.50 on October 16, Beyond Meat stock shot up to $7.69 on the morning of October 22. This occurred even though Beyond Meat is a financially distressed company with a massive debt burden.

Ironically enough, shares of Krispy Kreme (DNUT) stock also rallied during this recent meme stock wave. Thus, the stocks of a supposedly healthy meat alternative company and a doughnut purveyor rallied in tandem.

GoPro (GPRO) stock also catapulted higher, so there’s no real connection or commonality between the stocks that Reddit users evidently short-squeezed. It’s randomness of their stock picks that makes it difficult to predict the next runner and profit from the meme stock phenomenon.

Courtesy: @joealertz

On the other hand, it’s not entirely random as any heavily shorted stock could be a good candidate for a short squeeze. For instance, Beyond Meat stock was so heavily shorted that sometimes there were literally no shares available for short selling.

And so, some traders will continue to scan the markets for heavily shorted stocks in hopes of identifying the next Gamestop or AMC stock. It’s awfully hard to time the move, however, and getting it wrong could prove to be a costly mistake.

But then, some meme stock aficionados view this as more than just a trade. They liken it to a moral crusade in which their role is to “fight the evil short sellers.”

There’s even a relatively new exchange traded fund (ETF) to capture this movement, known as the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF. Its ticker symbol is MEME, appropriately enough.

For what it’s worth, Beyond Meat did complete a debt-swap deal with some of the company’s creditors. This will give the company a cash runway, to some extent, to fund Beyond Meat’s operations for a while.

Courtesy: @xMarketNews

It’s unlikely that frenzied meme stock traders were weighing the company’s financials when they bought up the shares during the past couple of weeks. Astoundingly, over a billion Beyond Meat shares traded hands in a single day not long ago.

So, what are the broader implications of this type of trading behavior? It’s not necessarily a sign of a stock market bubble, though a rough 2022 did follow the meme stock mania of 2021.

Instead of focusing solely on popular meme stocks, it’s possible to apply the snap-back principle to whatever high-quality stocks you’re interested in. For example, if a junior gold mining stock has healthy fundamentals but the stock has a high level of short interest, the price could snap back to the upside at any given moment.

Most importantly, serious investors should research a company’s fundamentals and not only look at the share price or the short interest. Meme stocks will come and go, but great companies will have staying power and the ability to reward their shareholders for many years.