Canopy Growth Corp. (CGC) on Thursday became the first legal-cannabis firm to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, but dipped more than 6% to close at $28.68. The stock had closed Wednesday at $30.21 on the OTC pink sheets, then opened Thursday at $30.85 on the Big Board before tanking.
Canopy CEO Bruce Linton told TheStreet he was “a little bit” disappointed by the pullback, but added that “there has been retail selling and institutional buying — I like that. [And] we didn’t go there for one day of trading.”
Cormark Securities analyst Jesse Pytlak told TheStreet that snagging an NYSE listing “represents a major milestone for the company and the cannabis industry as a whole. It validates cannabis as an investable sector and as a legitimate and potentially sizable consumer vertical, and demonstrates the shift in attitudes towards the acceptance of cannabis.”
Based in Canada, Canopy has traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “WEED” since 2014, when it became the first regulated cannabis producer to list shares anywhere in North America. The company’s Toronto-listed shares have rocketed nearly 400% over the past year and are up some 28% year to date. Canopy also came to the forefront of Wall Street’s attention in October 2017 when Action Alerts PLUS holding Constellation Brands (STZ) took a minority stake in the company.
Bruce Kamich, technical analyst for TheStreet’s Real Money premium site for active traders, recently checked out WEED’s charts and wrote that the stock “looks bullish and is probably headed for new all-time highs.” (You can read his full report here.)
Canopy’s business includes operations in eight countries, as well as a 2.4 million square feet of licensing marijuana farms. The company said this week that it plans to expand that to 5.6 million square feet by 2018’s end to “meet demand from the recreational market following legalization, as well as the rapidly expanding global medical cannabis market.”
— Daria Solivieva contributed to this report.
(This article has been updated to reflect Canopy’s closing stock price and add quotes from the CEO.)
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