Rivian Draws Crowd of Retail Investors on First Day of Trading

(Bloomberg) -- Retail investors piled into Rivian Automotive Inc.’s electric debut when shares of the truck maker’s value soared as mentions across social media platforms surged.

The Irvine, California-based company is Wednesday’s most traded stock on Fidelity’s platform with about 46,000 buy orders from customers. That’s more than double the number of Tesla Inc. purchases, the second-most bought stock, and triple the demand for recent retail-favorites Lucid Group Inc. and Ford Motor Co. combined.

Rivian’s symbol was the number one trending stock ticker on trader chatroom Stocktwits as mentions on Reddit’s WallStreetBets rivaled those of AMD Inc. and Nvidia Corp. Rivian’s opening surge was the biggest ever for a U.S. IPO that raised at least $5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Rivian joins the ranks of companies that have yet to generate sales like Lucid Group Inc. and Nikola Corp. despite massive valuations. That may not bode well for future performance of the stock as the median return for sales-less companies in the Nasdaq Composite over the last six month was a 20% loss. That compares to a more than 15% return for the index.

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