What’s old is new again. As Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns finally ease, and citizens reacquaint themselves with their former haunts, a Forbes’ 1998 cover—which declared “A bunch of kids are tormenting Wall Street!”—could have been written yesterday.

A heated national conversation about so-called “meme stocks” has been ongoing among US investors, traders, legislators, and the average online Joes and Janes for six months, a result of the January 28 fiasco, in which video game retailer GameStop soared to $483 on the New York Stock Exchange (Nyse), nearly short-squeezing the life out of hedge funds Melvin Capital and Citron Research. Now, some data providers are getting innovative, releasing new datasets and investment analyses for meme stocks and retail trading behavior, or training up their artificial intelligence (AI) models to learn the lingo of Reddit, or sitting the craze out altogether in the hopes that it dies down.

In what could arguably be described as a public service, an UrbanDictionary user added a definition of “meme stock” to the zeitgeist on January 5, describing it as “any publicly traded company stock that keeps going up and disregards the fundamentals such as revenue and profits when valuing the underlying company.” Recent examples include GameStop; movie theater chain AMC; home goods retailer Bed, Bath, & Beyond; and cellphone manufacturer-turned-enterprise software specialist BlackBerry, among a host of others. In other words, things just keep getting weirder.

Some providers such as S&P Capital IQ, the research division of S&P Global, are sitting the craze out. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on the meme stock trend, but explained the reason for S&P Capital IQ not getting directly involved: “It’s more that it’s not a focus because we provide the data but not the investment analysis. Our customers would have to use our data to determine their own analysis.”

But other data companies aren’t deterred. Alternative data provider Thinknum has moved to meet the surging demand for data and insights on the companies that land within Reddit users’ bullseye, and on the Redditors themselves. Thinknum is tracking the 100 most popular tickers on top Reddit forums such as r/WallStreetBets and screening for specific mentions of company names. The methodology is distinct from Thinknum’s coverage of other social media forums like Twitter, where the vendor focuses on metrics like follower counts, says Graham Gilliam, Thinknum’s growth marketer. To put it another way, who says what is more important on Twitter, but on Reddit, it’s what everyone says that counts.

However, the company has not yet gone as far as providing sentiment analysis on the posts, meaning that Thinknum’s machine learning and natural language processing models can largely ignore its many linguistic nuances—phrases such as “diamond hands,” which refers to holding a valuable stock over a long period, “paper hands,” which refers to closing out a position the moment the market shifts, and “tendies,” which translates to “gains,” or payoffs.

“Our top clients are hedge funds and investment banks. They’re going to be ones looking at this data, and they can decide what they want to do with it,” Gilliam says. “I think there’s value in us saying, as an example, ‘We’re seeing the number of mentions of GameStop spiking over the last few days.’ Then depending on the position they have in the stock, [it’s up to them] what they will do with that information.”

Clients have begun pairing Thinknum’s Reddit data with other datasets, which has offered a level of reasoning behind some meme stocks’ price movements, Gilliam adds, though such revelations seem to go against the illogic that defines a meme stock. By using data such as job listings, it’s possible to find strong(ish) fundamentals underneath an otherwise confounding stock.

“Let’s just say the number of mentions increase, and a stock is now the number one talked-about count on Reddit. Then we’ll go look at job listings data, for example, and we’ll see that their job listing numbers are actually up 52% as well. These Redditors know something; a lot of times, they aren’t just pulling something out of thin air,” Gilliam says.

Nasdaq-owned alt data shop Quandl is proceeding with Reddit and meme stocks cautiously, finding that its clients are certainly interested in them, though less so from an alpha strategy perspective. Rather, they can function as more of a unique, quasi-insurance policy that can offer risk management functions by detecting risks early and helping ensure clients are positioned correctly, says Bill Dague, head of alternative data research at Nasdaq. He says the vendor’s quant and fundamental clients are in agreement on this purpose.

As a result, Quandl does not yet have any plans to release new offerings devoted to meme stocks, as the company is keenly aware of hype’s often short lifecycle, and that looming regulation of zero-commission trading apps such as Robinhood could pull inflated stock prices back down to Earth. The company’s development team is, for now, “experimenting,” Dague says, and is weighing how to satisfy demand responsibly.

Though the meme-stock saga may amount to some temporary enthusiasm, Dague is hyper-aware of its underlying themes, which are likely to stick around. Chief among them is the comfort with exposure to the market, trading, and volatility that the cryptocurrency boom has fostered over the last few years.

“If I’m a retail platform, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to get someone who’s never traded a stock before to sit down and trade a stock, because that none-to-one transition is a lot harder than the one-to-two or one-to-10,” Dague says. “I think crypto probably helps with that. I think there’s a bit of a renaissance in fintechs as well, in thinking about the user experience and the ways to encourage people to engage with the market. But obviously, there are some valid concerns around how far that goes.”

Ben Silverman, director of research at InsiderScore, which tracks insider transactions, stock buybacks, management changes, and institutional holdings, says his company—which recently merged with research management platform MackeyRMS—has created a custom add-on to one of its flagship offerings, its database of analyzed 13F filings, to garner risk management capabilities as a result of meme stocks.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires investment managers with at least $100 million in assets under management to disclose their equities holdings in 13F forms quarterly. InsiderScore has taken its database of 13F filings—which is a component of its data platform—and overlaid it with what it calls the “fundamental hedge fund group,” the pool of US long-short hedge funds that have roughly 10 to 300 holdings. The parameter mostly eliminates large hedge funds and quants. Then the company seeks out overhangs caused by large positions on a certain stock.

“When there’s a large put position like that, it’s a recipe for a short-squeeze. So if you’re short the stock, you want to be aware of that,” Silverman says. “There’s obviously an inherent danger—especially with these [meme] stocks—of not just one short-squeeze, but multiple short-squeezes.”

As for whether meme stocks are good or bad for hedge funds and for data providers’ businesses, the jury is out—at least in the public eye. But maybe in the data there’s a clearer answer, says Jon Caplis, founder and CEO of PivotalPath, a hedge fund consultancy founded in 2013. It covers 2,300 hedge funds across 40 strategies globally by working exclusively with institutional allocators such as pension funds, endowments, wealth managers, and large family offices. This gives the company insights into the ways in which about $2.5 trillion of hedge fund capital across the globe is used and moved.

PivotalPath recently created its Meme Stock Basket to systematically track hedge fund exposure to this risk factor. The basket includes 15 of the most cited stocks on Reddit, including GameStop; AMC; BlackBerry; Bed, Bath & Beyond; and Nokia. The company then systematically analyzed whether these positions could have further repercussions across the hedge fund industry. In evaluating more than 1,000 institutional-grade hedge funds, it has found that the vast majority of hedge funds are not exposed to this risk factor—meme stocks—in any statistically significant way.

According to PivotalPath’s analysis, these hedge funds’ average correlation and beta to the risk factor is near zero, even when adjusted for volatility and even when the company adjusted the analysis over six, 12, and 18 months.

“The punchline is: It’s very contained. Are people thinking about it? Are they aware of it? Are they trying to stay informed? Yes. But outside of a few of the big names that we heard about in January … it’s pretty darn isolated,” Caplis says.