Clover Health Joins Top WallStreetBets Stocks: What's Going On?

Clover Health Investments Corp CLOV has popped up on the list of top trending stocks on r/WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum that conducted a short squeeze in shares of GameStop Corp GME earlier in the year. 

What Happened: Shares of the Chamath Palihapitiya-backed health technology company closed 20% higher at $8.82 on Friday and rose another 2.38% in the after-hours trading to $9.03. 

At press time, around midnight Monday, Clover was trending on the Reddit forum, at the number four spot, just behind Tesla Inc TSLA in the list of WallStreetBets trending tickers as compiled by Swaggystocks.com.

Screenshot Of Clover-Centric Discussions On r/WallStreetBets

Update: On Monday morning, S3 followed up with an additional tweet suggesting Clover’s actual short percent of float is 36.9% based on an “updated” float number from FactSet.

Why It Matters: Clover attracted a short interest of 35.7% at press time, according to Highshortinterest.com, a sorted database of stocks that have short interest over 20%.

In January this year, highly shorted stocks of GameStop, along with American Entertainment Holdings AMC, and Nokia Oyj NOK, and others surged and saw surging activity on WallStreetBets. Clover could similarly see a big short squeeze, according to some.

In February, Clover was the target of short seller Hindenburg Research — the same firm that targeted Nikola Corporation NKLA last year leading to the ouster of its CEO. 

Hindenburg alleged in a report that Clover misled investors and is under investigation by the Department of Justice.

On Friday, the former director of the Center for Medicare and the principal deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Trump era — Demetrios Kouzoukas — joined Clover’s board of directions, Business Insider reported.

In October, Sequoia Capital and Alphabet Inc’s GOOGL GOOG Google ventures-backed Clover went public through a merger with Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp III in October with an enterprise valuation of $3.7 billion.

Read Next: BofA Remains Bullish On Clover Health With Improving Visibility Into Growth

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