What's the beef with Beyond Meat's shares?
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Leanna Byrne.
We'll count the cost of Jaguar Land Rover's cyber attack, and Starlink devices have been linked to scam centres in Myanmar.
So what's the beef, listeners?
Or rather, what's in Beyond Meats Burgers?
Here's its CEO, Ethan Brown.
What you're having here is you're having no cholesterol, you're having lower saturated fat, no concerns about carcinogens, etc.
And so that's what excites me so much about this.
I have two children and really this is about enabling them and others to eat more, rather than less, of their favorite products.
Well, here's the thing.
The share price of Beyond Meat has rocketed.
It's up more than 300% in just a few days.
Retail traders are piling in and buying, sending the stock soaring.
Some are even comparing it to the same kind of frenzy we saw with the meme stock GameStop and AMC.
Russ Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell, is here to explain to us what a meme stock is.
Russ, take it away.
So it's a company often whose share price has done badly and one where Wall Street professional investors are betting the share price will go down and instead retail investors, private individuals, talk about it, get together on social media and start piling in in the view that the share price could go up really, really quickly.
Now Ross, when I think of an investor, I think of you.
You know, at your laptop, with your Bloomberg terminal, you're in an office.
But what's the difference between you and a retail investor?
Investor will look for long-term risk-adjusted, slowly accumulated gains by looking at a company's business model, financials and management.
A trader will look for quick bucks and price momentum.
OK, well, let's hear from a retail trader, Dmitry Semenikin.
He's a Russian investor known online as Capybara Stocks, and he told me why he's taken an interest in Beyond Meat shares.
As personal investments.
From time to time, I find stocks that I personally like and that I think are good investments.
And I had a habit of posting to Reddit whenever I made the large investment, just to understand the feedback and for people to tell me where I actually went wrong.
And surprisingly, this time, everyone agreed.
The initial thesis on Beyond Meat is quite simple.
After the meteoric rise.
At its beginning, the company was trading at roughly 6 per share for the longest time.
It only dropped to about 3 per share when the risk of bankruptcy appeared that it couldn't repay close to a billion dollar debt.
And when it actually canceled its debt by converting all of those bondholders to shareholders instead of going back to 6, it dropped below 1, which is when I started buying up shares.
But I suppose some criticism of retail investors that they're just out there to make a quick profit, that they're not really that interested in the company itself.
And particularly if you're putting things out on YouTube or Reddit that you just want your value to go up.
It's true.
Although if you look at those videos and posts I made.
At the end of each of them.
I've encouraged people who are up on their investment to trim them down and reduce risk, because I think that there is a level at which all of this excitement is not really driven by fundamentals anymore.
And in fact, my price target that I gave was $6 per share.
And at the moment, we're already above that.
Whenever such communities formed around companies and they became meme stocks, almost always the company ended up better than it was before, primarily because the company had access to so much liquidity and was able to raise cash.
It's definitely not something.
Most people who are buying this stock and quickly flipping it and I think the average hold time is less than a day, probably based on the volume.
But for those that do hold for volatility and don't try to pinpoint an exact exit point, the fair value will eventually be larger than 6, which without that wouldn't have been the case.
That was Russian retail trader Dmitry Semenykin.
Ross, I mean, you're my traditional investor on the programme today.
What's your take on what Dmitry was saying?
I can understand the point about the company cleaning up the balance sheet, but what it now needs to do is prove that it can turn its plant-based protein products into consistently, sustainably into profit, which it has failed to do so far in a very competitive marketplace.
Do investors like him, do they have a responsibility?
Should he be putting stuff out like that on YouTube?
I'm sure that if the regulator feels he's done something wrong, it will act appropriately.
But we haven't seen that during past meme stock episodes so far.
All right.
Another story, Netflix shares took a tumble down more than 8%.
Ross, what's going on there?
The company produced its third quarter results and released those to investors overnight.
And the core business is doing well, showing the value of its prime content television programs series, sports films.
And subscribers continue to watch those in great numbers and perhaps even in some cases now taking the advertising.
There seems to be a tax issue in Brazil, which has dented the company's profits.
I think if you take the view this is just a one-off, then you're not going to worry.
But given that the company's got a habit of beating estimates, and this time it didn't, it may have prompted one or two traders, dare I say, to take some profits.
Oh, those traders.
I mean, is it the case that people have too high expectations for Netflix?
Because what you mentioned, the company, it is doing well.
Subscriber numbers are good.
So, I mean, it's not hitting expectations.
Does that really mean that it's not doing well?
Not necessarily, not in the short term.
Again if it's just a one-off because of a tax issue.
But your point about expectations in another way is correct.
The company's stock market valuation is nearly $500 billion.
It's forecast by analysts to make profits of $11 billion this year.
So the valuation is a very, very high multiple of earnings.
That's great if people think it's going to make those profits or exceed them.
Again, if people think there could be a problem, that's when you tend to see people running for cover, because the high valuation leaves little downside protection.
All right, Ross Mould, always a pleasure.
Popmart, the Chinese company behind those viral Laboo Boo dolls, has seen sales surge 250 thanks to new mini versions of the toy.
But analysts warn the craze may be cooling.
Resale prices have plunged as supply floods the market.
And JP Morgan says the stock, which is up more than 400% this year, could be a bubble.
About to burst.
Now Elon Musk's SpaceX says it's cut off satellite communications to more than 2500 Starlink satellite devices used by scam centres in Myanmar.
The BBC's Jonathan Head has more.
Campaigners against the international scam business which has proliferated across Southeast Asia in recent years have long cited Elon Musk's Starlink satellite service as critical communications technology which enables the mainly Chinese crime syndicates to run their schemes from remote locations along the Thai-Myanmar border.
Now Starlink has responded by cutting the service to more than 2500 terminals it has identified as being used for online fraud in Myanmar.
This decision follows the takeover of one of the biggest scam compounds known as KK Park, but the Myanmar military as it retakes territory lost to insurgent groups over the past two years.
Jonathan Head there.
Now in the UK.
Experts say the cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover may have cost the automaker 25 billion, making it the most expensive attack of its kind in British history.
That's according to the Cyber Monitoring Centre.
So how did they work that out?
Here's the BBC's Joe Tidy.
They're an independent research group and they are staffed by some pretty expert cyber researchers.
And what they've done is they've looked at all the publicly available information...
And they've carried out surveys of some of the impacted people in the supply chain of JLR.
And they have done their own kind of industry analysis to try and get this figure.
Because, of course, JLR hasn't said at all how much this is costing.
They haven't said very much at all, actually, about the cyber attack.
They've just called it, I think they're still calling it a cyber incident.
So there are a lot of kind of caveats which the CMC admit.
So, for example, they are basing it on the idea that JLR will be back to fully functioning, churning out cars in the thousands per week, by about January 2026.
And we don't know whether or not JLR is negotiating with the hackers or whether or not they've paid any money to the hackers, which will add on potentially another you know tens of millions of dollars on the ransom.
It certainly looks like a criminal attack aiming to extort money out of JLR.
Joe Tidy there.
It's a story we've been following for a while, so just check it out on the BBC News website for more analysis.
And that's it from World Business Express with me, Leanna Byrne.
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Thanks for listening.
