This is a chart showing trading in a company called CYNK Technology since June 17. The stock is up nearly 25,000%. That's not a typo.
Google Finance
The company's stock has gone from $0.10 at June 17 to $14.71 as of Wednesday's close.
This is a gain of more than 24,000%. For some perspective, Apple, one of the most successful companies and stocks of the last generation, is up about 18,000% since it went public in 1980.
But there is, as you could imagine, a slight problem with CYNK: It's not clear if there's any value to it.
The website associated with the company is introbiz.com. On introbiz.com, under the "About IntroBiz" section, it says that, "Thru our marketplace you may both buy and sell the ability to socially connect to individuals such as celebrities, business owners, and talented IT professionals."
This premise, as we understand it, is basically a Facebook-like social network where you would pay IntroBiz (or CYNK, or whoever), to connect you with someone else.
Maybe someone cool or famous. Who knows.
Here's a screen shot of the home page. We're not quite sure what to make of it.
introbiz.com
The stock trades over-the-counter on an unregulated exchange, and as a result isn't required to follow the same financial reporting rules as companies that trade on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.
The last SEC filing for the company is a Form 15, which is a filing used by foreign companies to suspend their duty to file financial reports with the SEC.
On March 31, the company told the SEC it would be unable to file its Annual Report on Form 10-K.
And so trying to get a picture of CYNK's financials is a difficult task.
The company's contact info, per otcmarkets.com, lists an address in Belize.
However the same site says the company is incorporated in Nevada, and is classified as a data processing and preparation firm.
According to data on Yahoo Finance, the company reported no revenue for any of its fiscal years ended on December 31 2011, 2012, or 2013. This data also shows that the company's total operating loss for 2013 totaled $1.5 million.
Yahoo Finance
The company's last financial report with the SEC is from November 2013, and reports CYNK's quarterly results for the quarter ended September 30, 2013.
There again, no revenue is reported.
SEC
The company's 10-Q also shows that it has no assets.
SEC
Beyond the company's financials, just who is involved with the company gets even stranger: there is only one employee.
In its March filing with the SEC that says the company will not be able to file its annual report, Marlon Luis Sanchez is listed as the company's president, CEO, CFO, chief accounting officer, secretary, treasurer, and director.
In a filing with the SEC, however, the company says it "does not have an employment contract with its key employee, the sole shareholder who is the Chief Executive and Chief Technical Officer."
According to data from Bloomberg, Sanchez owns 210 million shares of the company.
As of November 7, 2013, there were 291.45 million shares of the company outstanding, according to an SEC filing.
Just today, the stock was up more than $8, or nearly 150%, and people began to take notice.
TheStreet.com's Herb Greenberg on Twitter said:
Who trades garbage like $CYNK? Based in Belize…registered in Nevada…has only one exec. God love bull markets.
- Herb Greenberg (@herbgreenberg) July 9, 2014
Others found that calls to phone numbers listed for the company went unanswered. Business Insider found the same.
A Twitter search for $CYNK is instructive. No one really knows what is going. Except probably something that's, well, impure at the very least.
It's unclear who is buying CYNK stock, and not a lot of the outstanding shares are even being traded.
According to Google Finance, just less than 100,000 of its 291 million outstanding shares traded hands today. Yelp, another social media company worth about $5 billion, saw 4.7 million of its 60.9 million outstanding shares trade hands today.
It's unclear how this ends - or who is left holding the bag at $14 per share - when people realize the company has no assets and no revenue.