Wendy's Hits the WallStreetBets Drive-Thru; Crypto Follows With Extra Pickle 🧑‍🍳

Shares of fast-food chain Wendy's (WEN) jumped nearly 26% on Wednesday after the company became the latest focus of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, which previously drove the GameStop meme stock saga. The stock had fallen as low as $6.08 earlier in the week before closing at $7.86, with an intraday high of $8.89 and continued gains in after-hours trading. A post on the forum titled "We need to save Wendy's" was upvoted more than 18,000 times, with the original poster writing, "We need to save Wendy's before it's too late," citing the firm's drastic share price decline in recent years and adding, "If this company goes bankrupt, we'll all be out of a job!"

Trading volume exceeded 203 million shares prior to market close, compared with a typical daily average of less than 10 million, a 1,970% increase according to Yahoo Finance. The rally did not erase longer-term losses; shares remain down 36% over the past year and 66% over the past five years, per Yahoo Finance data. The ticker climbed to the #1 trending spot on StockTwits, as individual users posted screenshots of share purchases and long options trades referencing the same call to action.

While retail traders piled into Wendy's, digital assets extended a multi-day sell-off. Bitcoin fell as low as $59,217 before recovering to $60,700, a 2.7% decline over 24 hours according to CoinGecko and its lowest level in 21 months, marking a third straight daily decline. Ethereum and other altcoins moved in tandem with the broader downturn, reflecting pressure on Wall Street risk assets.

Crypto traders attempted to mirror the equity trade on-chain through a meme coin version of the ticker (WEN) launched on Pump.fun on Solana, which is unaffiliated with The Wendy's Company. The token reached a $439,000 market cap within 24 hours, a more than 1,450% gain. A pinned comment on the viral Reddit post displayed the original poster promoting the token, whose Solana address begins with "Eav7v," in their forum bio, tying the equity squeeze to a parallel token push.