What happened
Shares of PLBY Group (PLBY 1.51%), which describes itself as a leisure and pleasure company, rose sharply at the open of trading on April 21. Although the stock was up 10.5% at roughly 11 a.m. EDT, it had earlier risen by as much as 13.5% or so. There was no particular news out of the company that would have driven the advance, but that doesn't mean there was nothing for investors to read.
So what
Not too long ago, PLBY Group announced that it would be working with Nifty Gateway to mine the back catalog of Playboy magazine. The goal is to work with outside artists to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) so PLBY can use some of its old content in a new way. It's a solid idea and definitely touching on an area of technology that's been drawing a lot of attention lately. That said, this is not new news at this point, and excitement about the broader NFT space appears to be cooling off to some degree.
Image source: Getty Images.
However, that hasn't stopped news outlets from picking up on the theme here. In fact, yesterday the NFT story was retold by multiple business news sites, at least one of which is quite sizable. You can argue that they are late to the party here, but when a media outlet with a broad following announces that a stock has an interesting story, it can bring in new investors. That's most likely what's going on today.
Now what
PLBY Group IPOed in February via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), so it has a very short trading history. But in just a couple of months the stock is up more than 200%, including today's gains. Since the company won't actually report a full quarter of earnings as a public company until it releases second-quarter results, the quick rise is largely driven by the story here and not by financial results. Long-term investors interested in PLBY Group should probably keep this one on the watch list until it has a bit more of a track record as a public company. That's not to suggest that the story isn't interesting, only that there's not a whole lot to back it up at this point.
