Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment Stock Drops To Nearly An All-Time Low

On a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke the 27,000-point barrier and most media and tech shares posted modest gains, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment shares fell nearly 6% to close at $7.16.

The stock price is close to an all-time low for the nearly two years since the streaming-oriented media company had its IPO in 2017. It has erased all of the gains from the spring, when the company swung a deal with Sony giving it control of Crackle, sending shares up to a 52-week high of $13.11. Over the past year, the share price has dropped 25%.

Analysts contacted by Deadline were not concerned about the movement of the stock, noting the light trading volume (about half the normal level on Thursday) and also the modest float of a bit less than 3.2 million shares. The float is the number of shares available for public trading, once the stock controlled by insiders, employees and other stakeholders is removed from consideration.

Daniel Kurnos, a media and internet analyst for The Benchmark Co., said the downturn is “nothing other than the normal shareholder impatience.” In an email, he called Chicken Soup “quite an intriguing story, but it’s not big enough and there’s not enough float to attract institutional interest.”

Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. said the likely culprit is “no new news.” He added, “Investors want to see numbers. Hopefully things will change with the Q2 report in August.”

The company, which also operates major ad-supported streaming platforms like Popcornflix, which it acquired along with the rest of Screen Media, has not yet confirmed a date when it will release financial results. Quarterly earnings season gets under way for media companies next week, with Netflix reporting its numbers on July 17.