THE ROARING KITTY
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A blue chip airline that briefly traded like a meme stock.
Airlines were devastated by the pandemic and heavily shorted on the assumption that recovery would take years.
American Airlines got swept into the retail wave in mid 2021 as traders bet on reopening, and it moved with the meme basket rather than with its sector.
This was a large, established company with real assets. Its inclusion showed the movement had grown well beyond small caps.
By this stage retail flow was large enough to move serious index constituents, not just microcaps.
The point at which institutions stopped treating this as a curiosity and started treating it as a risk factor.