American Graphite Technologies Inc (OTC:AGIN) With an Old-Fashioned Pump
A lot of volume and not much in terms of price. This is how American Graphite Technologies Inc (OTC:AGIN)’s trading session from yesterday can be described. The number of shares that changed hands was huge – 2.2 million when you consider that the average volume for AGIN so far has been 83 thousand. So what caused all the stir?
Well, AGIN were dealing with developing solutions for the automation of air conditioners, heaters and ventilating systems. They ditched those back in July 2012 when they changed their name and started doing business as a mineral exploration company. AGIN also claim that they are developing a technology that is supposed to make the extraction of graphite and graphene a lot easier. We doubted that this is enough to boost the volume to such heights, however, so we kept searching for something more.
They issued a press-release recently in which they say that they have appointed a new adviser from Ukraine, who is extremely experienced when it comes to mining graphite. This might be some good news, but we were still not convinced that this was able to produce such a massive spike in the number of shares traded.
After a lot more digging around, we managed to unearth a hard mailer pump for AGIN. It was received on March 12 and it’s extremely amusing. A friendly investor has scanned and uploaded the brochure which you can get through this link, but in case you don’t feel like downloading a 40MB PDF file, we’ll summarize it to you. It’s 28 pages of pretty pictures, diagrams and a lot of optimistic projections for future revenue. The sources of AGIN‘s rivers of gold will range from cell phone batteries to state-of-the-art soldier armor. We don’t mind their optimism, but we somehow feel that the pumpers could have put a line of two about how AGIN plan to develop their technology and when they are going to start digging graphite and graphene out of the ground.
Looking through their financial statement, we fear that they will need some more time to get the whole operation going. For one, according to their latest quarterly report their financial situation is not that good. Here are the most important figures as of December 31:
- cash: $315 thousand
- current assets: $437 thousand
- current liabilities: $17 thousand
- revenue: $0
- quarterly net loss: $115 thousand
You might be thinking at this point that with hardly any liabilities, they are rather well off, but we reckon that shareholders will argue otherwise. When they started their graphite venture, they exercised a stock split and increased the amount of authorized shares. Since then, they have been issuing stock like there’s no tomorrow and the potential dilution for the future is even more terrifying.
These things are not mentioned in the pumpers’ extensive and optimistic “report” on AGIN and we can, to some extent, understand their cheerfulness. The disclaimer on the PDF file is indeed a bit blurry but, after squinting a lot, we managed to understand that the people standing behind the whole campaign have received a whopping $1.1 million as compensation. We would have been excited as well.
The third party paying for the whole awareness activity is a company called Heavenly Vision Ltd. and, try as we might, we didn’t manage to find any information about them on the Internet. This raised our suspicion even further and we would like to advise you to do your own extensive research before jumping in on the hype.
