Oklo Stock’s Wild Ride: Why It Skyrocketed Before Crashing Today

Nuclear energy play Oklo just gave traders whiplash—here's what lit the fuse.

Pump first, ask questions later: Retail investors piled into Oklo after vague rumors about a DOE partnership. Then reality hit.

The sell-off came faster than a radioactive decay chain when zero concrete details emerged. Wall Street's algo traders finished the job—because nothing fuels volatility like machines trading on headlines they can't comprehend.

Bonus jab: Another day, another 'story stock' proving most traders wouldn't know fundamental analysis if it bit them—just keep chasing those candles, folks.

Image source: Getty Images.

Good news for Oklo

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) picked Oklo to perform two projects under its new Reactor Pilot Program, and picked Oklo subsidiary Atomic Alchemy to perform a third, the company announced today. All three projects are in furtherance of President Donald Trump's May 2025 executive order to get at least three working small modular reactors (SMRs) up and running by July 4, 2026.

This sounds like pretty great news for Oklo, and we haven't heard (yet) about either of its closest rivals in the SMR space,(NNE -2.17%) or (SMR -1.99%), winning similar contracts.

Both of those other nuclear stocks are down today, by the way, and down even more than Oklo.

Less-good news for Oklo

Digging a little deeper into the news, however, and going to DOE's website to learn if any other companies did win contracts, I discovered that a total of 10 separate companies (two of which are Oklo or its subsidiary) did win contracts. Neither of the 10 is Nano Nuclear or NuScale, which is pretty bad news for those companies, I suspect.

But also, eight of them are not Oklo, and that means Oklo's not quite the odds-on favorite to inaugurate the nation's nuclear renaissance, as its initial press release might lead one to believe.

And this, I suspect, is why Oklo stock was unable to hold on to its gains today.