The lunchbox is for the clouds. Tàper, the well-known company in the United States that markets containers for the preservation and storage of food, is climbing the stock market at full speed. It has accumulated a rise of 500% in a little more than a week and 700% in the last two.
Just yesterday the mid-afternoon appreciation was 23.6% and approaching $5.30 per share. To give you an idea of ??the acceleration, on July 21 they had fallen to 67 cents per dollar. Still, we’re still a long way from the all-time highs reached on Wall Street in late 2013, when the stock topped $94.
Volatility rules, but so does speculation, in a business that has experienced several ups and downs throughout its history. In fact, this unexpected and meteoric rise in Tupperware shares does not correspond to the health of the company’s business. On the contrary, it takes place after the company received a warning from the New York Stock Exchange in June about the continuity on Wall Street because they saw that its average capitalization during a consecutive period of 30 sessions was less than 50 million dollars. At the same time, the company warned that it was crossing another red line: the average closing price of Tupperware common stock was below $1 for a period of 30 consecutive days (penny stock in English).
The company went so far as to admit in April that there were “substantial doubts” about its ability to continue due to its financial situation. Tupperware experienced a moment of glory during the pandemic, when with the confinement and the closure of restaurants, investors attributed a rosy future to it, anticipating a boom in home food. Since then, the titles fell by 97% from January 2021 to this summer.
Several analysts warn that behind the skyrocketing rise in the company’s shares may be speculative moves like those that in January 2021 encouraged the fever of meme stocks, such as GameStop. Likewise, another possible explanation for the rally would be the hasty closing of bearish positions on the stock.
The mechanism is always the same: retail investors (with anti-establishment leanings) buy securities of a company that is on the verge of bankruptcy with the aim of causing losses to hedge funds and short investors, who take bearish positions on some securities and make profits when the price of these securities falls (and losses when they rise).
The stock’s recent gains have cost short sellers roughly $37 million in July, according to data from analyst firm S3 Partners, as the stock price rose more than 10-fold. This is how the rebels protest on Wall Street: by lifting the cap.