Paid Pumpers Finally Give Interactive Leisure Systems Inc (OTCMKTS:IALS) A Push
A lot has been going on around Interactive Leisure Systems Inc (OTCMKTS:IALS) in the past couple of weeks. First, on July 18, a new CEO by the name of Richard Dickieson was appointed. Then, a couple of weeks later, an agreement for the acquisition of a company called Tech 7 Systems, Inc. was announced. That’s hardly a shock because, once you do a bit of research, you’ll find that in addition to steering IALS, Mr. Dickieson is also at the helm of Tech 7. On the bright side, the press release from July 30 says that the candidate subsidiary has generated more than $700 thousand in revenues during 2012 and that’s most definitely a good thing.
Good, but apparently, not good enough by IALS‘ standards. Just a couple of days later, another announcement came out. This time it’s a marketing agreement with UK’s third biggest airport and an entity called Travel Marketing International, which should expand IALS‘ future customer base.
Lots of potential growth, but as the annoying infomercials often say: “But wait, there’s more!”. Around 8:00 AM yesterday came the fourth press release in a matter of just twenty days. It’s another agreement for another acquisition and the target this time is called Travel Time Technologies Inc (TTI). According to the announcement, the future daughter company is already established on the market and it offers a variety of IT services to a large customer base. So large, in fact, that during 2012, TTI has registered more than $1.7 million in revenues. That’s all well and good, but we do have a couple of problems.
Let’s start with TTI. As we mentioned, IALS said yesterday that their future subsidiary is a solid IT venture. You’d expect for such an enterprise to have a strong Internet presence, but it would appear that this is not the case. In fact, when you do a quick search and exclude the word “InterActive” in order to avoid scrolling through IALS press releases, you’ll find that there isn’t even a business description which, for an IT company, is rather suspicious.
The other thing that we’re not too sure about is IALS‘ stock performance. As you can see the press releases that came out during the last three weeks or so have been mightily optimistic and normally, promises of future revenues give small cap tickers a massive boost, but looking at the historical prices, we can see that despite the good news, the value barely managed to break the $0.20 per share mark. Until yesterday, that is.
Ever since the announcement of the new CEO, the promotional newsletters have been all over IALS and between July 17 and July 31, we have managed to intercept more than twenty emails all touting the ticker as a great investment opportunity. The outfits were relatively small and apart from Penny Stock Chief who received $15 thousand for a multi-day awareness campaign, compensations didn’t exceed $7,500.
Apparently, however, the third parties paying for the whole thing saw that the ticker is not performing as planned and they decided to call the big boys. Reinforcements came from Stock Mister (SM), who pocketed $50,000 for their efforts and sent out their first alert a couple of hours after Monday’s closing bell. Since then, they have sent out two more reminders and we’re not sure if it was SM’s presence or something else that caused it, but IALS absolutely exploded yesterday. It opened the session at $0.255 (twice as much as the previous value), ran to an intraday high of $0.50 and finished the day at $0.349, which is an increase of 179% over Monday’s close.
That is some smashing performance and by the looks of things, new players like Damn Good Penny Picks (who received $25,000) seem to be joining the party this morning, which would suggest that the touting may continue for a little longer.
Does that mean that the ticker will continue gaining ground, though? We’re not so sure. There are quite a lot of question around IALS‘ future and the fact that the stock is put under so much promotional pressure is definitely a cause for concern.
And here’s one more thing to think about while making your decision. From the very beginning, IALS seemed like the perfect target for a paid pump. Just like other promotional disasters (Sanborn Resources Ltd (OTCBB:SANB) and Arch Therapeutics Inc (OTCBB:ARTH) are typical examples) IALS had a different name, ticker symbol and business plan until a couple of months ago. Then, for some reason, they changed their operations, performed a stock split, put some new people at the helm and if you’ve been around penny stock promotions as much as we have, you will know that all these things are often prerequisites for a pump. Make sure you keep this in mind while you are contemplating a potential investment in IALS.
