It's been a feeding frenzy in Sundial's options pits during the past couple weeks
Go ahead and add marijuana name Sundial Growers Inc (NASAQ:SNDL) to the list of "meme stocks" going wild this week. The equity is up 14.9% at $1.30 today, and has tacked on a whopping 55% from a week ago. Sundial has all the trappings of a stock primed for a Reddit-fueled rally. It's currently firmly entrenched in penny stock territory -- similar to GameStop (GME), which sat close to the $2 level just a little over a year ago -- and its heavily shorted. In fact, short interest currently makes up an exorbitant 309.5% of the stock's available float.
Giving the equity even more traction is a halo lift from the pot sector. A massive merger between Tilray (TLRY) and Aphria (APHA), and comments from Amazon (AMZN) supporting federally legalized sales of cannabis are casting a favorable glow on the downtrodden cannabis space. But of course, with speculative trading comes tons of volatility. SNDL is one of the best performing stocks on the Nasdaq today, and looks to have found some support for this volatility by way of its 180-day moving average, but it still has a ways to go if it wants to overtake its brief spike to the $4 level the stock enjoyed in mid-February.
Regardless of Sundial stock's next move, its been a bit of a feeding frenzy in the equity's options pits. The stock just popped up on Schaeffer's Senior Quantitative Analyst Rocky White's list of stocks that attracted the most option volume during the past 10 days, with names highlighted in yellow new to the list. According to White, 805,802 calls and 70,555 puts were exchanged. The two most popular contracts during this time period were the 6/4 1-strike call, and the 5/28 1-strike call.
This translates into extreme bullishness among options traders, per the security's 10-day call/put volume ratio of 14.2 at the International Securities Exchange (ISE), Cboe Options Exchange (CBOE), and NASDAQ OMX PHLX (PHLX). This bullish behavior is continuing into today's trading, with 2.71 million calls traded so far -- double the intraday average -- compared to just 205,000 puts.
Sentiment among the brokerage bunch hasn't been as sunny. Of the six covering SNDL, three say "hold" and three say "strong sell." Plus, the 12-month consensus price target of 76 cents is a 40.3% discount to current levels.