Retail trader focus turns to energy stocks

Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre discusses retail traders piling into small energy stocks.

Video transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Well, as we watch those energy names really closely, a bit of a pullback today, obviously, moving alongside those commodity prices. Retail traders, they're trying to ride the recent wave in energy prices. And they are speculating with small US energy companies. Ines Ferre with that story for us this morning. Ines, we don't always put retail traders and energy side by side, but no real surprise here, given the gains that we've seen.

INES FERRE: That's right, given that the energy sector has been the outperformer this year, the only sector being in the green this year. Retail traders trying to ride that wave. And they're doing this with small companies, small US-based energy companies. And they've been trading these, especially over the last several days. We have noticed on our YFi Interactive board, we noticed some of these small companies that were trading like Imperial Petroleum-- that's our YFi Energy Board leaderboard right there.

But if we pull up the small companies, which are essentially some of the penny stocks that have been trading, Imperial Petroleum, Cambridge Energy, Houston American Energy, Nine Energy, these are some of the names that were popular on our Yahoo Finance trending ticker page. And a common theme that you will see with these companies, they've been trading in the single dollar digits. They've been exploding on social media, on StockTwits, highly mentioned. They have been some of the top 10 retail trader names on Fidelity. Very speculative.

I spoke to Matt Kohrs, who is a YouTube commentator on retail trading. He said, look, retail investors are attracted to these names because they make-- cost a dollar, $2 a share. Then they'll see the share prices double in a day or two. And he said they're not buying this for the long haul. They're not buying CEI, for example, Cambridge Energy, to hold it for a couple of decades. It's more of a swing trade for them.

And I'll just give you an example with Nine Energy. Nine Energy reported its quarterly results this week. Last week, Nine Energy was trading at about $2.40 a share. On Monday, it was trading at $7 a share. On Tuesday, it was at $9 a share. So certainly a swing trade, which retail traders have been involved in recently.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, a lot of money to be made in that space right now. Ines, thanks so much for that.