It happens every working morning now, between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. ET, the adoption of a couple of stocks, hijacked from their closing price and gunned so hard that you have to wonder exactly what kind of game is being played. Some of the time the stocks are oddball biotechs, the kinds that just got approval for a mid-stage trial for some illness that, thank heavens, you’ve never heard of. Sometimes they can be stocks with news that we don’t know about yet, typically leaked downgrades or upgrades from brokerage houses. We’ll never know how the leaks were obtained and by whom. We just know it’s nefarious. But then there are the kinds of stocks that have become the staple of the 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. crawl, as we call it, that stream of stocks and prices that goes across the bottom of the CNBC television screen. Each subsequent tick seems a little higher than the previous print. It’s as if something is going on at that very moment, and there are people who are furiously trying to get in before everyone knows about the good news. There’s only one problem: There is no news, good or bad. People are just buying these stocks to foment some sort of activity, one we can’t seem to grasp. We aren’t in on the joke, or the contest, or the riches. Who insists on getting in some D-Wave Quantum or some Rigetti Computing at 4:12 a.m. in a fashion so aggressive that it looks like they are actually trying to move it up? That’s what they must be doing because, at that ungodly hour, it’s highly unlikely what we call
