These Stocks Are More of a Gamble Than an Investment — and the #1 Is a Reddit Favorite

As with seemingly everything in markets these days, it all ties back to the Reddit Wall Street Bets message board.

No, we’re not talking aboutGameStop(ticker: GME). Rather, Castor Maritime (CTRM). The dry-bulk commodities transportation firm was trading around 20 cents earlier this year until it was swept up in momentum as users of the message board recommended the company, sending shares as high as $1.95.

The stock was identified as a potential gamble using methodology from recently published research paper—from Alok Kumar of the University of Miami, Houng Nguyen of the University of Danang, and Talis Putnins at the University of Technology Sydney and Stockholm School of Economics. The group proposed looking at the average volume over 30 days compared to market cap as a way of determining what they called lottery stocks. “We assume that gambling in stock markets involves disproportionate amount of trading in lottery-like stocks,” they said.

Castor topped the research group’s list of New York Stock Exchange- and Nasdaq-listed companies that were potential “lottery stocks.”Barron’sadded to a filter to the list to look at companies with market caps of at least $500 million andpublished the listin January.

We ran our version of that screen again this month. Castor Maritime topped our list this time.

Sundial Growers(SNDL), the cannabis stock, andGenius Brands International(GNUS), the children’s media company, appear high on the list too. The top NYSE-listed stock wasAMC Entertainment(AMC), the movie chain operator that, with GameStop, became a poster-child for theso-called meme stock revolution.

And what about GameStop itself? It’s not in the top 20, but the methodology does put the video-games retailer high: Out of more than 3,000 stocks, GameStop ranks 128th as a lottery stock.

The stock scoring lowest in the lottery stock rankings was Google owner Alphabet(GOOGL).