For traders, the biggest winner on Monday had to be bitcoin. Prices for the flagship cryptocurrency surged after Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) announced it would be accepting bitcoin payments in the future for its electric cars. As expected, prices ended up jumping by around 19.4% over the past 24 hours. However, the biggest winners weren’t so much the cryptocurrencies themselves, but rather the few cryptocurrency miners listed on public exchanges. One of the best performing of which happened to be Riot Blockchain (NASDAQ: RIOT), whose stock jumped 40.3% over the course of the day.
Riot has had a history of being one of the most volatile Nasdaq stocks on the market. In addition to being one of the only cryptocurrency miners listed in America, the company also made a major leadership announcement yesterday. The company stated that it had appointed Jason Les as the company’s new CEO, who had previously been on the Board of Directors since 2017.
“In early 2020, Riot made the strategic decision to completely focus on expanding its mining capabilities, which has positioned the Company well to take advantage of significant opportunities in the current Bitcoin environment,” said Benjamin Yi, Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Strengthening our management team to take advantage of these opportunities has been a high priority for the Board, and we are pleased to appoint Jason to lead the Company.”
While there’s not a lot of news surrounding Jason Les’s prior accomplishments, traders chose to look at this as a piece of good news for the future. Riot also announced it had appointed a new independent director to the board as well, Jannah Cho.
Today’s spike in Bitcoin price has obviously played a big role in Riot’s stock price jump as well. Additionally, some of the other remaining cryptocurrency miners on the market have surged as well. Marathon Patent Group (NASDAQ: MARA) is also up around 42%, with pre-market trading sending the stock rising another 23.3% right now.
At the same time, there’s bound to be plenty of new traders following the GameStop (NYSE: GME) situation looking for the next hot trade to make. Desperate to jump on to any winning stock, I wouldn’t be surprised if these same traders are now looking at Marathon and Riot as the next potential stocks to try to buy en masse. Whether or not they will succeed in turning these stocks into the next GameStop remains to be seen.
Thanks to higher Bitcoin prices, Riot has finally managed to break a profit. While cryptocurrency mining is no longer feasible for individuals, for the most part, large companies with dedicated mining networks can eke out a slight profit as long as prices remain high. Last quarter saw Riot report a slight $2.5 million in net income.
Riot Blockchain Company Profile
Riot Blockchain Inc is focused on building, supporting and operating blockchain technologies. Distributed blockchain technology is a decentralized and encrypted ledger that is designed to offer a secure, efficient, verifiable and permanent way of storing records and other information without the need for intermediaries. It serves as a medium of exchange, store of value or unit of account. The company’s portfolio consists of Verady, Tesspay, Coinsquare, and others. – Warrior Trading News
