Top 16 meme stocks this week on Reddit: Alibaba comes back from the dead and Nvidia catches fire while AMC and GameStop stick around

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Interest in meme stocks is heating up, both in markets and in online forums like Reddit, as small-time retail investors continue to search for stocks to send "to the moon." 

So-called meme stocks have no exact definition but are easy to spot. They tend to undergo sudden, volatile price swings on high trading volume driven by internet users. The two meme stocks to go mainstream, GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC), are up 756% and 1,602%, respectively, this year.

But scouring Reddit forums for meme stocks can take time, and there's no guarantee of success. That's why Travis Rehl, a software engineer who rode GameStop's first big stock rally in February, set out to make the search for the next big meme stock easier by creating a website called HypeEquity. The site tracks and analyzes posts about stocks in investing subreddits to reflect which meme stocks are popular and rising. 

"I made some money off of GameStop, and I said, 'Hey, this is pretty cool, I want to do more of this,'" Rehl told Insider. "And I quickly realized it's impossible to do more of it because you have to spend so much time to research and learn. So I said to myself, 'I'll make other people do it for me.' … Letting other people do stock discovery and talk about it, and then they'll bubble to the top, the top 10 things I should be looking at, and I'll spend my time on those."

HypeEquity has two top 10 lists of stocks on its homepage: hyped stocks, or those with the most mentions and high trading volumes; and trending stocks, or the fastest risers on Reddit.

Four stocks appear on both lists this week: Alibaba (BABA), Nvidia (NVDA), Clover Health (CLOV), and Tesla (TSLA).

Below is a list of the top 16 stocks on Reddit from HypeEquity's hyped stocks and trending stocks pages, as of early Tuesday. Along with each stock are its ticker and the following data from HypeEquity: category (hyped or trending), social mentions, and social volume percent change.

Ticker: BABA

Category: Hyped, Trending

Social mentions: 893

Social volume change: 363%

Ticker: GME

Category: Hyped

Social mentions: 645

Social volume change: 354%

Ticker: NVDA

Category: Hyped, Trending

Social mentions: 377

Social volume change: 293%

Ticker: AMC

Category: Hyped

Social mentions: 330

Social volume change: 279%

Ticker: CLOV

Category: Hyped, Trending

Social mentions: 283

Social volume change: 183%

See Also:

• Bank of America names 10 stocks that global fund managers are piling into instead of Apple, Amazon, and Tesla — and shows how buying them is a way to outperform the market
• These 5 stocks offer the most short-squeeze potential for retail investors this week, according to Fintel
• Bank of America names 9 infrastructure stocks to buy as Biden's bill passes through Congress — and lists 4 key risks facing the sector that investors should note