Pumpers Give Up on Aqua Power Systems Inc (OTCBB:APSI)

Some people should be pretty ashamed of themselves at the moment. Those people pocketed no less than $30 thousand and they were told to pump up Aqua Power Systems Inc (OTCBB:APSI)’s share price.

They put together a landing page and they filled it with a combination of stock images, colorful graphs, and quotes from serious media outlets like CNN (which, of course, have nothing to do with APSI). They even created a video clip in which a person whose name remains unknown talks about how you can soon be swimming in cash if you invest in APSI.

Basically, the pumpers used every conceivable trick in the book in an attempt to push the ticker towards the higher end of the chart. They failed miserably. Not only that, they completely annihilated the stock.

When people first started talking about the landing page, APSI was sitting at just over $0.70 per share. The hype did manage to result in a couple of green sessions, but the gains were barely noticeable and the volumes were quite modest. Interest did eventually pick up around September 16, but that’s when things turned ugly.

All the initial gains were wiped out in a matter of a single session and APSI then took several massive blows. It managed to drop from a high of just over $0.81 on September 15 all the way to less than $0.06 per share at the end of yesterday’s session. In other words, APSI incinerated more than 92% of its value in a matter of less than ten days.

That’s a pretty horrific score. In fact, it’s so horrific, that the pumpers have done something that they don’t do very often – they’ve admitted defeat. The landing page has been down since at least the end of yesterday’s session and the anonymous person who was persuading you to throw your money in APSI until several days ago is persuading you no more. The video has also been taken down.

The pumpers who were tasked with inflating APSI‘s share price probably want to forget about the whole thing and most likely, the same goes for the investors who trusted them. Nevertheless, we reckon that trying to find the reasons for the truly horrendous performance is worth while. After all, learning from your mistakes now could save you a dollar or two in the future.

On the face of it, APSI does seem to have a few things going for it. A couple of months ago, its business plan was changed when the public entity and a Japanese company called Aqua Power System Japan closed a reverse merger. Since then, APSI has been selling batteries that operate when you fill them with water. Although it sounds quirky and although this is the OTC we’re talking about, it’s not some sort of pie-in-the-sky technology, either. The batteries are actually on sale in Japan and, as an 8-K form from a few months ago tells us, they’ve been generating revenues for at least a couple of years.

So, in some aspects at least, APSI doesn’t look like the majority of pumped OTC ventures. When you dig a bit deeper, however, you’ll see that it was never going to sustain the prices it was sitting at a couple of weeks ago.

As we mentioned already, the public company that we now know as APSI had a completely different business plan until a few months ago. Naturally enough, it also had a different name – NC Solar Inc. When NC Solar was trying to have its stock listed on the OTC Markets, some of its shareholders offered a little over 1.4 million shares for sale at a price of $0.15 per share. In 2014, the company effected an 18 for 1 forward split which means that those 1.4 million shares were immediately transformed into 26.1 million shares. And they were all sold for less than $220 thousand.

The lucky shareholders who acquired them had (and still have) a massive profit opportunity on their hands, and nobody can blame them for taking it. The whole situation (which we touched upon in some of our previous articles, by the way) does, however, make a lot of people wonder whether there’s any connection between the discounted shares issued a few years ago and the promotion from the last several weeks.

About twenty minutes into today’s session, APSI is sitting at $0.062 (a bounce of about 5%).