Futu News, May 15$Beyond Meat (BYND.US) $It has been listed on NASDAQ for eight trading days. On the day of listing, the company's shares jumped 163%, the best IPO performance since the financial crisis. As of Wednesday, May 14, its shares have risen 218% since IPO. Beyond Meat shares are booming because investors believe that the meat substitute business is expected to achieve breakthrough growth, which allows such suppliers to distinguish themselves from traditional food companies.

But as the share price soars, bearish bets on the stock are also growing rapidly. According to BloombergAbout 44% of the Beyond Meat shares available for trading have been shorted. Data from financial analysis firm S3 Partners further show"artificial Meat first share" has become one of the top 20 American companies that have been shorted the most.

After four consecutive gains since listing, Beyond Meat was targeted by bears and then fell three times in a row.

According to foreign media reports, Bruce Cox, founder of the American Harrington Alpha fund, is in the short camp. He believes that the stock price of Beyond Meat has soared since its listing, the current valuation level is already quite ridiculous, and the stock price is bound to fall back, so his new long-short strategy fund began to go short on Wednesday.

Cox believes that the reasonable level of Beyond Meat shares should be more than $40, that is, near the opening price.The reason why its share price has soared without being bearish, Cox said, is because US sellers' research on the company is still in a restricted period, and when the limit expires on May 28th, sell-side analysts will start advising customers to sell at their current position.

Some analysts wrote in the report that Beyond Meat "may be interesting." But he stressed that the company was still losing money, faced with many competitive competitors, relied on a single supplier to invest 79 per cent of its products, and did not have any fixed cooperation contracts with manufacturers.

In fact, while Beyond Meat is rising one after another, there are still doubts about the potential market for plant-based meat products.

Several states in the United States are already considering adding rules: if Beyond Meat and other artificial meat companies' products do not contain any animal labels, their marketing as meat will be further restricted.

In other words, if artificial meat can never be recognized by the mainstream meat industry and become a clear meat, then plant protein will always be an alternative product, and it will be difficult for Beyond Meat to prove its valuation.

However, from the perspective of stock price performance, the market is indeed very optimistic about the "artificial meat first share".

Alexia Howard, an analyst at Bernstein, believes that the Beyond Meat stock price still has room to rise, and gives a rating of "outperforming the market", with a target price of about $81. It also said that the artificial meat market has great potential, and the US market alone is expected to reach $40.5 billion in the next decade. If Beyond Meat had a 5 per cent share of the market, it would have 2 per cent today: that would mean sales of $2 billion in 2028, she wrote in a report to clients.

Thomas George, president of Grizzle, a research firm, has a conservative estimate, but it is still startling. He said in a research paper last week that the artificial meat industry will be worth more than $34 billion by 2030 and that the US artificial meat market will grow at an annual rate of 40 per cent over the next decade.

Individual investors in Beyond Meat can also be described as bigwigs Yunji Inc, including Microsoft Corp founder Bill Gates, famous movie star Leonardo DiCaprio and McDonald's Corp's former CEO Don Thompson.

Impossible Foods, the "artificial meat" company in which Mr Li Ka-shing's Horizons Ventures is a shareholder, announced yesterday that it had raised $300m in its latest round of financing. The company has carried out several rounds of financing so far, in addition to Horizons Ventures, Bill Gates, UBS and Temasek are all its investors.

Impossible Foods claims to make cheese fermentation to extract the natural hemoglobin in soybeans, focusing on beef ground meat products made of "plant protein".

Compared with Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods has a larger financing scale. Beyond Meat raised just $122 million before it went public-more than six times as much as Impossible Foods. On the contrary, compared with Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods was founded two years later.