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Interactive Brokers founder and chairman Thomas Peterffy warned on Monday investors betting against so-called meme stocks like AMC Entertainment.

“These stocks are extremely tempting to buy short, but unless you have huge liquid resources, try to resist the temptation as these prices can hit unimaginable highs before they settle down to a reasonable valuation, and you may have to cover on the high. ” Period, “said the online brokerage pioneer in an interview with CNBC’s” Squawk Box “.

AMC’s shares rose as much as 25% on Monday and eventually closed 14.8% higher. The stock rose 83% last week alone, despite declines on Thursday and Friday. At the close of trading on Monday, AMC shares were up approximately 2,500% in 2021.

“Over the long term, stocks are always approaching their fundamentals, which in this case are much, much lower,” Peterffy said, admitting that this is why short sellers see an opportunity in certain stocks like AMC, which have risen in price after exiting. Reddit dealers were preferred.

Short selling a stock is a bearish strategy in which an investor borrows stocks and then immediately sells them in the expectation that the price will go down. In this case, the short seller buys back the stock at the lower level and returns the number of stocks borrowed to take advantage of the difference. If the opposite happens, a short can try to limit his losses by buying back the stock at higher prices.

Peterffy’s comments come after a wild week of trading at AMC and a few other companies like Bed Bath & Beyond and BlackBerry. While GameStop drew most of the attention in WallStreetBets’ epic short squeeze in January when the Reddit-fueled trading frenzy first surfaced, AMC has risen its profile – and share price – over the past few weeks.

The cinema chain, hard hit by the Covid pandemic, has capitalized on the enthusiasm of private investors by selling additional shares to raise money. AMC has also launched initiatives aimed at its retail investors, such as exclusive demonstrations.

Despite AMC’s efforts, Peterffy said the company still had a difficult road to go to justify its valuation and suggested that long investors who want to buy and hold the stock should stay away as well.

“If you’re willing to sit there and hold a stock at $ 200, $ 300, $ 400 that is still not making any money … there is no way that prices can be held at that level because more and more people are shorting them be, “he said.

“At some point these stocks will go back to their value, which is roughly the single-digit dollar range, even if that is,” he added. “Long-term long positions will lose their money. So while you as a trader may be trying to catch a sudden uptrend, I would advise against buying these stocks.”

LGBTQ small business owners are having a difficult time getting back to business pre-pandemic.

Just over 20% are having a hard time finding employees, according to a new CNBC + Acorns and NGLCC Small Business Owner Financial Health Survey. The lack of workers could wind up hampering their efforts.

Of those facing a hiring crunch, more than 42% blame unemployment benefits.

LGBTQ business people aren’t the only ones unable to attract employees. In fact, overall, the number of all small business owners struggling is higher. A record 48% reported unfilled job openings in May, according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

There has been an ongoing debate over whether government benefits, like the extra $300 in unemployment, are keeping people out of the workforce. The most recent jobs report for May reflected this, according to some economists.

That comes as 25 states are doing away with enhanced federal unemployment benefits earlier than Sept. 6, the official expiration date. Those states hope to encourage workers to reenter the labor force.

On the other side, those who support the continued $300 benefit argue the move will do more harm than good.

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The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab, making it the first U.S. regulator-approved drug to slow cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s and the first new drug for the disease in nearly two decades.

The FDA’s decision was eagerly awaited. The drug, which is marketed under the name Aduhelm, is also expected to generate billions in sales for the company offers new hope to friends and families of patients living with the disease.

“We are aware of the attention associated with this approval,” said Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a press release. “We know that Aduhelm has drawn the attention of the press, the Alzheimer’s patient community, our elected officials and other interested stakeholders.”

“With treatment for a serious, life-threatening disease in balance, it makes sense that so many people followed the outcome of this review,” added Cavazzoni.

The FDA said it would continue to monitor the drug when it hits the US market. The agency granted approval on the condition that Biogen conduct another clinical study.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that more than 6 million Americans live with it. According to the group, this number is expected to rise to almost 13 million by 2050.

To date, there have been no FDA-approved drugs that can slow the mental decline of Alzheimer’s, the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. The agency has approved Alzheimer’s drugs that are aimed at relieving symptoms rather than slowing the disease itself down.

Federal agencies have come under intense pressure from friends and family members of Alzheimer’s patients to speed up aducanumab, but the road to regulatory approval has been controversial since it showed promise in 2016.

In March 2019, Biogen stopped work on the drug after analysis by an independent group found it was unlikely to work. The company then shocked investors a few months later by announcing that it would apply for regulatory approval for the drug after all.

Biogen’s shares soared in November after the company received support from FDA officials who said the company had very “compelling” evidence of aducanumab’s effectiveness and “an acceptable safety profile that would make its use in individuals would assist with Alzheimer’s disease “, submitted.

But two days later, a panel of external experts advising the US agency unexpectedly declined to approve the experimental drug, citing inconclusive data. It also criticized the agency’s staff for rating it too positively.

When Biogen filed for approval for the drug in late 2019, its scientists said a new analysis of a larger data set showed that aducanumab “reduces clinical decline in patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.”

Alzheimer’s experts and Wall Street analysts were immediately skeptical, wondering whether the clinical trial data was enough to prove the drug works and whether approval could make it difficult for other companies to enroll patients in their own drug trials.

Some doctors have said they won’t prescribe the drug once it hits the market because the mixed data packet aids the company’s use.

Supporters, including advocacy groups and family members of patients desperately looking for a new treatment, have admitted the data is not perfect. However, they argue that it could help some patients with Alzheimer’s, a progressive and debilitating disease.

Biogen’s drug targets a “sticky” compound in the brain known as beta-amyloid that scientists expect to play a role in the devastating disease. The company previously estimated that approximately 1.5 million people with early-stage Alzheimer’s in the United States could be candidates for the drug, according to Reuters.

The FDA’s decision is expected to reverberate across the biopharmaceutical sector, RBC Capital Markets analyst Brian Abrahams said in a June 1 announcement to customers.

The US agency said Monday that it had determined that there was “substantial evidence” that the drug was helping patients. “With Aduhelm approved by the FDA, an important and critical new treatment is available to patients with Alzheimer’s disease to combat the disease,” it said.

A help wanted sign is displayed outside of a business before Memorial Day near the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey.

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The weaker-than-expected April jobs report fueled speculation of U.S. labor shortages and led some state officials to declare an early end to enhanced unemployment benefits.  

Yet forecasters hoping for clarity from the May tally may be left scratching their heads.

It’s hard to draw conclusions about sustained weakness or labor-supply issues from the data published Friday, according to economists. The May report offers something of a mixed bag and somewhat contradictory data points, they said.

“It’s a Rorschach test,” according to Nick Bunker, an economist at job site Indeed. “It’s a bunch of ink on a piece of paper, and everyone is seeing different images.”

May jobs report

For example, there’s the headline number: The U.S. economy added 559,000 people to payrolls in May.

On one hand, some observers may use the data point to suggest workers aren’t rejoining the labor force as quickly as one might expect.

The jobs figure was below economists’ estimate of 671,000. At that pace, it would take more than a year to regain all the jobs lost since February, 2020.

On the other hand, job growth accelerated in May — new payrolls doubled from April. And the last few recessions were characterized by long job recoveries, economists said.

May’s job gains are also roughly equivalent to the average over the past three months — suggesting they were in line with what expectations should perhaps have been, Bunker said.

“I think it’s a story of expectation versus reality,” he said. “What’s a good pace of growth is sort of in the eye of the beholder.”

Labor force participation

Rising wages

Perhaps the most pronounced evidence of a labor shortage in the May jobs report is wage growth, especially in the labor and hospitality sector, according to Daniel Zhao, a senior economist at Glassdoor, a job and recruiting site.

Rising wages suggest businesses struggling to hire may be paying more to attract workers.

Unfortunately, the [May] report isn’t going to end this debate about labor shortages. Both sides have ammo to use to bolster their arguments.

Daniel Zhao

senior economist at Glassdoor

Hourly pay jumped nearly 9% over the past year, to $15.87, for non-managerial workers in the sector, which includes restaurants, hotels and bars, for example. (Earnings grew by $0.19 an hour from April.)

That growth is significant since leisure and hospitality seems to be where hiring challenges are being most widely reported, Zhao said.

However, the bump may not be solely — or even mostly — attributable to businesses raising pay.

Instead, tips likely account for the pay increase as restaurants and bars return to pre-Covid customer capacity, according to Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

“Since December 2020, the rise in tip income, not an increase in base wages, can likely entirely explain the acceleration of wages for production and nonsupervisory workers in restaurants and bars,” he wrote Friday.

Plus, leisure and hospitality jobs grew by 292,000 in May — the most of any industry and potentially undercutting the argument about worker supply. At the same time, that was a slowdown from 328,000 jobs added in April.

Critics of the labor-shortage argument point to other data points, such as average hours worked remaining relatively flat. (Businesses tend to boost hours for existing workers if they can’t onboard other staff.)

“Unfortunately, the [May] report isn’t going to end this debate about labor shortages,” Zhao said. “Both sides have ammo to use to bolster their arguments.”

What’s causing supply constraints?

To the extent that there are labor shortages, hiring challenges are likely to be temporary, according to economists.

Twenty-five states are ending enhanced federal unemployment benefits earlier than their official Sept. 6 expiration to try to encourage reentry to the labor force.

The earliest that the states, all led by Republican governors, are doing so is June 12.

“The most vocal source of speculation [for labor shortages] is that the supplement to weekly unemployment benefits is enticing a lot of people to stay home,” said Erica Groshen, a labor economist at Cornell University and a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Obama administration. “I think that’s far too simplistic.”

Economists point to a host of other factors that may also be dampening a return of workers to the labor force: child-care duties, ongoing health risks, health complications for Covid long-haulers, early retirements, career changes or reassessments, and a high historical share of workers who are furloughed and expect to be recalled to their prior workplace.

However, it’s impossible to quantify the extent to which any of these factors are playing a role during the economic recovery, experts said.

“These factors interact with unemployment insurance, which can allow workers to take longer to rethink their careers, try to find jobs in new industries and negotiate for higher wages — but can also slow employment growth and prolong long-term unemployment,” according to Harvard University economists Jason Furman and Wilson Powell III.