Yes, this was the week everyone became obsessed with pot stocks.
To be sure, interest in the cannabis sector has been building all year as news events — from various major companies making acquisitions to Canada’s pot legalization — make it clear that the space is entering a phase of rapid expansion and maturation.
But the dramatic swings in Canadian cannabis company Tilray’s TLRY, -30.25% stock this week seem to have pushed investor interest into the realm of frenzied fanaticism, the likes of which we haven’t seen since… well, you know when, right?
On Wednesday, views of the Tilray quote page surpassed that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.32% on MarketWatch’s site — and by a wide margin at that.
This has happened only two other times in the past year: On July 26, Facebook FB, -1.86% rose to the No. 1 quote on our site as it lost $120 billion in market capitalization; and it happened with the bitcoin-U.S. dollar quote page BTCUSD, -1.39% over several days in December 2017, when the cryptocurrency’s historic rally captured attention around the globe.
Traffic to the Tilray quote page from Monday to Thursday this week was 248% higher than the same period the previous week, and over 2,000% higher than similar periods in early August.
As we’ve written before, traffic to MarketWatch quote pages is one measure of what’s capturing investor interest in a given moment.
Here’s another: Over on Reddit, traders are talking up a storm. On the biggest finance-focused forums, talk of Tilray, Cronos CRON, -9.02% or other cannabis-related terms are up 90% from August, according to MarketWatch analysis of data from social monitoring tool CrowdTangle. In June, only 36 posts across these subreddits were related to cannabis. In September, that number is already at 358, with 175 posts just since Monday.
This surge in interest is also clear in the broadest indicator of all, Google search trends. Tilray made the top trending terms on Wednesday and Thursday, and there’s been an overall spike this week in searches of “cannabis stocks.”
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