Year of the Meme Stock: Hertz, Kodak Top List of 2020 Highlights
- Investors flocked to unusual bets, for better or worse
- Electric vehicles, vaccines among year’s biggest market themes
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
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Vaccine developers, electric-vehicle startups and a bankrupt car-rental company captured the imagination of individual investors in 2020 as Reddit chat rooms touted the so-called meme stocks as the next big winners.
“You saw an amazing amount of volume compared to normal and that came from the retail side,” said David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors. “The dumb money was the smart money this year” as lower-quality stocks -- those with negative earnings and substantial debt -- outperformed value stocks.