Hi Everyone!
Hope y’all are doing great! I’m still in Europe and in addition to the markets, we also have the weather here ravaging us with its stormy dance the last few days. I have mostly been indoors since Friday but the Storm Eunice has been so out there, that pretty much everyone’s got a crazy first hand story to tell. Mine was Friday afternoon when I was sitting in the hotel lounge, and suddenly the winds started blowing really hard and just as I was looking out the window, I saw a giant tree literally fall over and crash onto a car. The whole thing felt so scary and surreal. Below are some photos that our talented bartender at the hotel took:
And just like the choppy weather, the choppiness in the markets continues, including SPACs, including crypto. The only alternative asset class that’s up for the year is gold (up 5.3% YTD). But speaking of SPACs, the chart below is the best one I saw this week. Chamath tweeted “I’m about to really f*ck some shit up…just fyi.” on February 21st last year, and literally that date coincided with the top of the SPAC market, when the average SPAC was trading at a 25% premium to NAV, compared to a 1.2% discount today.
Our man was also in the news this week for stepping down as the Chairman of Virgin Galactic ($SPCE), his first SPAC deal. But actually according to the filings, he had exited his entire $SPCE position back in March 2021. He had 11.5 million shares, that he acquired at an average price of $8.66/share and sold them at $32.59/share for a profit of $255 million. (SPCE is now trading around $8.40. So that’s why the twitter and reddit mob is furious.) And not super relevant but just funny, he had 126,000 shares left which he gifted to his ChaChaCha 2019 trust. Yes - its called the "ChaChaCha Trust!”
We did have some quick chachacha movement this week when recent low-float high redemption despac $ISPO shot up 708% intraday, followed by $CPTN also registering a 600% gain. There were a couple others including $ANGH (up 220%) and $NRGV (up 200%). Most have given up over half their gains but still are trading way above their intrinsic and pre-euphoric values, which seems to be very reminiscent of the Trump’s $DWAC trade.
But call it what you want because this was enough to get our day traders excited and return to their job. The chatter around other low float despacs following suit was reflective in both their prices and volumes on Friday. Some of the names on that speculation list are:
$SKYH 1.8M Float
$GLS 0.8M Float
$GRNA 1.2M Float (Managed to hit 52 week high and low in the same day!)
$NRGV 4.1M Float
$FSRD 3M Float
$QNGY 0.7M Float
The most excitement seems to be around $HCCC, which after a few delays managed to close its merger with Alpha Tau Medical on Friday. Both the commons and warrants are up after-hours, and given their struggle to close the deal, peeps are reading that as at least a >90% redemption signal going into next week…which means we could have a tendie!
We will of course find out.
I’ll sign off on that note. Hoping for a week ahead of sunshine and tendies for everyone :)
-Nikita