inc.com 4 Key Traits: How a Reddit Inside Joke Sent Wendy’s Stock Skyrocketing 28 Percent Georgia Fearn 4–5 minutes
Wendy’s has spent months trying to sell investors on a turnaround. Today, retail traders gave the stock a different kind of boost.
Shares of the fast-food chain surged more than 28 percent today and briefly rose more than 40 percent intraday, after Wendy’s became the latest beaten-down consumer brand to catch fire with the meme-stock crowd.
The rally followed a burst of attention online. Reddit told Inc. the WallStreetBets post was live Wednesday and said “Save Wendy’s” was trending. Stocktwits told Inc. Wendy’s was its No. 1 trending ticker for most of the day, accounting for 5 percent of all ticker views on the platform. Messages using the ticker jumped 562.7 percent in one day, according to Stocktwits.
The rally comes as Wendy’s tries to revive a franchised restaurant system with more than 7,000 locations, falling U.S. sales, and a new leadership team. It also pulls the company into the retail-trading cycle that turned GameStop and AMC into market symbols during the 2021 meme-stock frenzy.
Wendy’s did not respond to Inc.’s request for comment. Trian Fund Management, the activist investor co-founded by Nelson Peltz and a longtime Wendy’s shareholder, declined to comment. Why Wendy’s was vulnerable
By Tuesday’s close, Wendy’s shares had fallen about 73 percent from their June 2021 record closing price. Short interest is now around 34 percent of Wendy’s free float, or roughly 53 million shares, according to ORTEX, a market analytics firm that tracks short interest and securities lending. About 80 percent of the stock available to borrow is already out on loan.
“It is genuinely crowded on the short side,” Peter Hillerberg, co-founder of ORTEX, told Inc. He said it would take short sellers five to six days of normal trading volume to buy back the shares they have shorted. “When a position is that crowded and that slow to exit, a sharp move up puts real pressure on very quickly.”
That pressure was already showing Wednesday. Hillerberg said short sellers were down about $105 million on paper during the move, reversing what had been a profitable year for bearish investors in the stock. “The shorts are now genuinely offside,” he said.
Still, Wendy’s is not a GameStop-scale setup. Hillerberg noted that GameStop’s short interest exceeded 100 percent of its free float during the 2021 frenzy, compared with Wendy’s roughly 34 percent.
Wendy’s also had an unusual advantage in meme culture. On WallStreetBets, jokes about being “behind the Wendy’s” have long served as shorthand for trading losses and desperation. The turnaround still has to happen in restaurants
The online rally gives traders a simple story. Wendy’s operating results show why the actual turnaround is harder.
The company named former Potbelly chief Robert “Bob” Wright as president and CEO in May. On Tuesday, it appointed another former Potbelly executive, Steve Cirulis, as chief financial officer and chief strategy officer.
They inherit a restaurant system under pressure. In the first quarter, Wendy’s U.S. same-restaurant sales fell 7.8 percent, global same-restaurant sales declined 6.8 percent, and net income fell to $22.7 million. The company ended the quarter with 7,251 restaurants globally, down 146 on a net basis from a year earlier. The meme-stock market
Wendy’s is the latest reminder that meme stocks are not only internet jokes. The first major wave came in 2021 with GameStop and AMC, when Reddit traders helped turn heavily shorted companies into symbols of retail defiance.
The pattern has resurfaced since, including renewed moves in those stocks after Keith Gill, the retail investor known as “Roaring Kitty” whose posts helped fuel the original GameStop rally, returned to social media in 2024. Other beaten-down names, including Opendoor, Kohl’s, Krispy Kreme, and Beyond Meat, have drawn similar bursts of retail-trader attention.
The targets tend to share the same traits: a beaten-down stock, heavy short interest, a familiar brand, and a story built for the internet. Wendy’s had all four.