What Kind of Hyper-Enthusiastic Market is this that Blindly Keeps Pursuing Scams to Make a Fortune Overnight, even if They Already Crashed the First Time?
It’ll take many more sell-offs and the collapse of many more iffy stocks before this hyper-enthusiasm, after nine years of central bank nurturing, is finally wrung out of the market.
Shares of “blockchain” company LongFin (LFIN) plunged 17% today to $14.31, the sixth trading day in a row of plunges. Intraday on Friday, March 23, shares still traded at $73. The astonishing thing isn’t that they’ve plunged 81% over those six trading days, but that they had more than doubled over the prior two weeks, and that they’re still trading above penny-stock status to begin with.
LFIN started trading on December 13, following their IPO. On December 15, LongFin announced – with what I called it “a mix of gobbledygook, hype, and silliness” – that it had acquired a “Blockchain-empowered solutions provider,” namely a website that belonged to a Singapore corporation that is 95% owned by Longfin’s CEO and chairman.
Though neither the announcement nor the transaction passed the smell-test, shares skyrocketed 2,700% to an intraday high of $142.55 on December 18, giving it a market cap of $7 billion and making it the role model for a bevy of other “blockchain” companies. Then, as stock jockeys grappled with reality, shares plunged. As did the shares of other “blockchain” companies.
But then on March 12, it started all over again, when index provide FTSE Russell announced that LongFin would be added to some of its indices, including the widely-tracked Russell 2000, effective March 16:
Then all kinds of things happened.
On March 26, short-seller Citron Research tweeted: “If you are fortunate enough to get a borrow, indeed $LFIN is a pure stock scheme. @sec_enforcement should not be far behind. Filings and press releases are riddled with inaccuracies and fraud.”
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