Fannie, Freddie shares mimic meme-stock mania with wild swings

Their influence helped drive retail traders to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose shares have soared more than 500% since Donald Trump’s election a year ago. But now, as equity markets are gripped by volatility and crypto assets suffer their worst rout in years, those same investors are fleeing.

Thursday’s wild selloffs, and further losses Friday, were a reminder that the fervor of retail traders — whipped up in part by Federal Housing Finance Agency head Pulte — can quickly turn sour. Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager, sent out a social media post this week blaming forced liquidations and margin calls in the cryptocurrency market for the sagging prices on the mortgage giants.

“I underestimated how much exposure Fannie and Freddie (‘F2’) have to crypto, not on balance sheet, but in their shareholder bases,” Ackman said on X.

Ackman’s theory for the pullback — that leveraged cryptocurrency investors facing margin calls had to sell other assets to raise cash — was echoed by some on Wall Street who saw the stocks drop by more than 10% on Thursday. It happened as Bitcoin was on track for its worst monthly performance since a string of corporate collapses rocked the sector in 2022. 

Read: Ackman Fannie-Freddie Plan Boosts Shares After White House Pitch

“There was clearly a lot more leverage to take out in crypto and the recent high-flyer equities themes,” Charlie McElligott, a cross-asset strategist at Nomura, wrote in a note to clients Friday.

Shares of the pair are up six-fold since just before Trump’s election on bets Pulte will help oversee a process to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after almost two decades of government control. The Trump administration has said it’s a priority, though has been mum on specifics and timing.

Pulte has frequently promoted the idea, with stock traders studying his social media posts for clues about what’s likely coming next.

It all has echoes of the first meme-stock phenomenon that emerged during the pandemic, when bored young people stuck at home and flush with stimulus checks started speculating in the stock market, driving wild runs in shares of GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. among others.

Read more: Pulte’s Social Media Posts Become Must-Follow for Stock Traders

Fannie and Freddie have been on a similarly tumultuous ride over the past year, including a drop of almost 40% since a Sept. 11 peak when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick talked up the prospect of taking them public. The volatility is also driven in part by the fact that the stocks have traded over the counter since they were delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in 2010, limiting the potential investor pool and stock liquidity.

Chunky swings are commonplace for both Freddie and Fannie. For the stocks to experience a two-standard deviation move — something that occurs only 5% of the time — they need to jump or fall by at least 10%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. By comparison, such a move would register at just over 2% for McDonald’s Corp. and at roughly 3% for Microsoft Corp.

Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, has long promoted buying Fannie Mae and rival Freddie Mac, saying the stocks are cheap and will rally when the US government unwinds its massive stakes. While Ackman has been a proponent of taking the pair of companies public in recent months and weeks, he said Tuesday that it will take “significant time” for the government to “deliberately execute.”