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In perhaps the wildest day yet for the nascent Weed Inc., shares in Tilray took a ride reminiscent of the Bitcoin craze and even the height of the dot-com bubble.

The maker of cannabis products nearly doubled before wiping out the entire gain in less than an hour, only to finish 40 per cent higher than where it started. Sure, Tesla has delivered some whipsaw sessions and AMD has tripled this year, but Wednesday’s moves had a different feel.

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“It’s almost like everyone wanted to express their fear and greed through one entity,” Michael Antonelli, an institutional equity sales trader and managing director at Robert W. Baird & Co., said by phone. “It’s fun to watch. It’s the wild west right now for cannabis. It isn’t the kind of thing that institutions would touch.”

Almost US$6.5 billion worth of Tilray shares traded hands on U.S. exchanges Wednesday, second only to Amazon.com’s US$7.6 billion — a stock almost 47 times the size of Tilray’s US$20 billion market valuation. The weed company finished the day bigger than 40 per cent of the companies in the S&P 500. The stock jumped another 10 per cent in early trading as of 7:30 a.m. in New York.