Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss the state of meme stocks.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

- Just to broaden it out a little bit and talk about meme stocks more broadly, and that was obviously such a mania, if you will, and just to show how they have done this year, we take a look at the Yahoo Finance Interactive. Here's a take a look at how some of these stocks closed yesterday and what they're doing in the premarket GameStop there in the middle on the bottom here as we watch that.

I do want to flip it on over, though, and take a look at what we have seen year to date from these stocks because it's pretty telling here. And I'm going to equal weight it so we can get more of a sense. So. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 of them higher on the year. Now, this is, of course, highly subjective. It's what we consider to be meme stocks and our Jared Blikre has consistently added new stocks to the board as they've kind of fallen into that category.

But again, this just goes to show you, and some of these guys have lost almost all of their value if you look at how they have done year to date. There is a new survey that we're going to be digging more into in a moment that asked retail investors have you invested in meme stocks before, GameStop, AMC, et cetera? Only 15.6% of them said yes. The vast majority of them said no. So I think it's interesting also to note that if you look at what has driven the volume in these companies, it hasn't been that many people necessarily that are driving it. It hasn't been that many individuals. And maybe even a lot of them have gotten out, perhaps.

- Right. And the driving force behind the mimetic tenor has been how they can issue or how they can move forward with an effective short squeeze. And you look at the amount of shares or the float that was shorted in GameStop at the peak of when some of the meme stock traders or the Reddit retail trading frenzy had really taken place and initiated, it was over 100% of the shares that were shorted at that point in time.

And so it means not only were they shorted once, but then twice over sometimes as well. And so for right now, the largest shorts in the market seem to be maxing out at about 45%. Bed Bath Beyond, one of our favorites to talk about here as well, is within that ranks. And so all that considered, you're not looking at the same environment of short interest that's out there in the market for a mimetic type of tenor or trade or sentiment to really initiate around, unless it's a Bed Bath Beyond, and even then you wouldn't still see the same type of squeeze that we had seen with GameStop or even with AMC.