The buyer wasn't a hedge fund. It was the government.
One stock tripled overnight. Another jumped 50% in hours. Both times, the buyer was the U.S. government.
Over the past year, the government has partnered with major companies—and taken direct stakes in others. When these deals became public, some stocks surged dramatically.
Inside the free report:
- All 24 companies named in the official government announcement
- Which are publicly traded vs. private
- 5 additional companies where the government took direct stakes
- How each stock reacted to the news
- Direct sources to verify the findings
No tips. No theories. Just the official record.
CLICK HERE TO REVEAL THE GOVERNMENT MISSION
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Further reading from Invested Early:
Hello.
A $1.4 billion solar manufacturer just got the go-ahead to turn a written-off battery factory above the Arctic Circle into an AI data center, and the stock rose 10% on Thursday. Tenable rose 12% the same day on nothing but a press release saying it joins the S&P SmallCap 600 on Monday. Build-A-Bear went the other way, losing 27% in its worst session on record.
The Nasdaq climbed 1.6% on Nvidia's $96.2 billion quarter, the Russell 2000 added 0.3% to 3,014, back above 3,000 after last week's dip, and Bitcoin crossed $80,000. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh speaks from Jackson Hole on Friday morning.
Here's what's inside today:
📈 Why joining an index can move a small cap 12% in a day
🏭 The solar maker turning an idle Arctic battery plant into an AI data center
🔥 Track which stocks short sellers are piling into
📊 Top gainers (and biggest losers) from Thursday's session
This is not financial advice. Always do your own research. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
Why Joining an Index Can Move a Stock 12% in a Day
Tenable reported no earnings on Thursday, signed no contract, and launched no product. It rose 11.8% anyway, on more than twice its normal volume, because S&P Dow Jones Indices announced after Wednesday's close that the cybersecurity company joins the S&P SmallCap 600 before Monday's open. Consider the size mismatch:
Tenable's market cap: about $4.1 billion Assets in the single largest S&P 600 index fund (IJR): $111 billion
Every fund tracking the 600 has to own Tenable by Monday. Three things follow from that.
The buying is forced and it has a deadline. Index funds don't form opinions about a company. They buy the assigned weight, mostly at the close before the effective date, which compresses days of normal volume into one session.
The pop lands on the announcement, not the add date. Traders buy ahead of the funds, so most of the move is in the price before Monday arrives, and historically the announcement gain tends to fade over the following weeks once the one-time buyers are done. The effective date is usually the worst entry.
A slot has to open first. Leggett & Platt left because Somnigroup bought it. Acquisitions, delistings, and promotions to the MidCap 400 free up seats, and the 600 fills them with companies between $1.2 billion and $8 billion in market cap with positive GAAP earnings over the trailing four quarters.
That last rule is the actionable part: a small cap in that range that just turned GAAP profitable is a live candidate. The bigger version is coming too. The Russell indexes add their first-ever December reconstitution this year, effective after the close on December 11, with the ranking cutoff at the end of October.
The Solar Maker Turning an Idle Arctic Battery Plant Into an AI Data Center
T1 Energy closed Thursday at $4.96, up 10.0%, after Norwegian officials approved a plan that could put a written-off asset back to work.
The news: T1, the Austin company formerly known as FREYR Battery, announced Thursday that the municipality of Mo i Rana rezoned 161,000 square feet of its Giga Arctic campus for data center use. The 926,000-square-foot building was built to make lithium-ion cells; when T1 bought a Texas solar module plant in late 2024, it dropped the battery plans and wrote the European sites down by roughly $313 million. What's left is a very usable shell:
A 50-year lease, with a 50-megawatt grid allocation from Norway's grid operator locked in through 2033
A queue position for 396 megawatts in total
A first 50-megawatt data center that management says could be running in 2027
T1 is pursuing "multiple pathways" to monetize the building, which reads as a sale or partnership rather than T1 running it.
Why it matters: The bottleneck for AI data centers in the U.S. is grid access, and it's getting tighter. Texas paused new grid connections on August 3 pending an audit of roughly 250 to 300 queued projects, New York enacted the first statewide moratorium in July, and Pennsylvania tightened permitting on August 18. Giga Arctic already has power, hydropower at some of the cheapest rates in Europe, with Arctic air for cooling.
The core business is separately real: second-quarter revenue was $250.1 million, up 88% from a year ago, with about 3 gigawatts of 2026 module output under contract.
The honest risk: This is a rezoning, not a tenant, a financing, or a building, and the stock is down roughly 65% from early June for reasons that haven't gone away:
The Austin cell factory's budget rose to $510 million from $425 million in July, with first production pushed to early 2027
Cash was $149 million at June 30 against $200 million to $250 million of remaining Phase 1 spending, and the larger debt package is still unsigned
The new $120 million of convertible notes convert at $4.46, just below Thursday's close
Trina Solar, the largest shareholder, sold roughly $190 million of stock in May
The data center is optionality on top of a financing story that has to land this quarter, and position sizing should reflect that order of importance.
See Where Short Sellers Are Piling In
Sarepta rose 11% on Thursday with no company news to speak of; heavy short interest did the work. We don't short stocks and don't recommend it, but knowing when a name is crowded with bearish bets is useful in both directions, and our partners at AltIndex track it every trading day.
Their short squeeze tracker pulls FINRA's daily short-sale data, shows what share of each stock's volume came from short sales, compares that with the recent average, and grades every name Normal, Elevated, High, or Extreme. Thursday's list had Denison Mines and Cipher Digital, a July scoreboard name, marked Elevated, with BigBear.ai and Nike at High. Each row opens the full ticker dashboard with AI Score, sentiment, and price.
🎢 The Small-Cap Scoreboard
Here's where Thursday's biggest moves landed. Nvidia and the software names carried the Nasdaq up 1.6%, while the Russell 2000 gained 0.3% to close at 3,014.
🟢 Yesterday’s biggest gainers
Symbol | Company | Price | Change | Market Cap | 52-Wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DeFi Development | $5.28 | +17.3% | $164M | -67% | |
Tenable | $37.62 | +11.8% | $4.14B | +8% | |
Sarepta Therapeutics | $21.59 | +10.9% | $2.28B | +6% | |
SELLAS Life Sciences | $15.21 | +10.8% | $3.07B | +615% | |
T1 Energy | $4.96 | +10.0% | $1.46B | +220% |
🔴 Yesterday’s biggest losers
Symbol | Company | Price | Change | Market Cap | 52-Wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Build-A-Bear Workshop | $28.44 | -27.3% | $350M | -50% | |
Vision Marine Technologies | $7.51 | -19.3% | $5M | -99% | |
Wendy's | $7.82 | -13.5% | $1.50B | -21% | |
HealthEquity | $93.39 | -10.6% | $7.81B | +18% | |
Paymentus | $35.61 | -9.7% | $4.49B | +2% |
DeFi Development rode Solana's 13% jump as it resumed buying coins, a small-cap echo of last week's amplification lesson. SELLAS climbed toward an imminent Phase 3 leukemia readout, Sarepta squeezed higher on essentially no news, and Tenable and T1 Energy are covered above.
On the loser side, Build-A-Bear cut its full-year outlook for the second time this year and lost a Walmart program, Wendy's gave back its takeover premium after Reuters reported Trian has no plans to bid for now, and HealthEquity lost a tenth of its value despite a beat and raise. Vision Marine's slide followed a 1-for-10 reverse split.
(Data: Yahoo Finance.)
🫡 See You Soon
Thursday brought a solar maker whose written-off Arctic factory may get a second life as an AI data center, a cybersecurity stock that rose 12% for being added to a list, and a toy retailer that lost a quarter of its value on a guidance cut. Two of those moves came from real changes in the business and one came from index mechanics, and part of the job in small caps is telling them apart.
We'll be back soon. Watching a name we should cover? Hit reply and tell us.
Cheers,
— Brandon & Blake of Invested Inc.
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