Tanaris Power Hldgs Inc (OTCMKTS:TPHX) Arrives at a New 52-week Low

The latest promotional email for Tanaris Power Hldgs Inc (OTCMKTS:TPHX) arrived a couple of hours after Thursday’s closing bell and it was sent by Stock Freak. The pumpers disclosed in the fine print that they have received $100 thousand for touting the stock and they also said that the ticker is on “full monster bounce alert“, whatever that means. They reminded their subscribers that the ticker was sitting at $0.76 last month and tried to imply that it can get back to those levels. There are more than a few things to suggest that the pumpers are catastrophically wrong.

The performance from Friday is one of them. Despite the touting, TPHX refused to move in the right direction and it actually lost a further 4%, closing the week at $0.22 per share. The overall behavior is pretty terrible as well. At the end of last month, the stock managed to shed nearly 60% of its value in a matter of just three sessions and although it’s been trying to bounce ever since, it has failed rather miserably at doing so.

The performance is, without a shadow of a doubt, quite appalling, but every stock goes through its ups and downs. If it is to go up, however, investors need to know what they’re buying and in TPHX‘s case, they don’t.

The management team changed the company name and ticker symbol in March because they were expecting to complete the acquisition of a private entity called Tanaris Power Inc. They had to make several payments in order to close the deal, however, and the latest 10-Q says that they have failed to do so.

So, basically, while the press releases say that the company is trying to develop state-of-the-art batteries, there’s nothing official to suggest that this really is the case. And even if the acquisition of the private Tanaris business gets completed, things will still look a bit shaky. According to Nevada’s Secretary of State, Tanaris Power Inc was established at the end of January 2015 – less than four months ago.

So, not a whole lot to suggest that TPHX deserves a valuation of more than $0.70 per share. And that’s without even looking at the thing that pushed it there in the first place – the paid pump. Stock promotions often take OTC tickers to unimaginable heights and when the budget is $600 thousand (as in TPHX‘s case), the hype and excitement coming from emails and landing pages can provide savvy investors with short-term profit opportunities. Sooner or later, however, the pumpers need to move on to their next victim and the promoted stocks experience a crash which is followed by some serious liquidity problems.

This is especially true when there are millions upon millions of discounted shares floating around. Sadly, TPHX falls perfectly in that category as well. As we mentioned at the very beginning of the pump, back in 2013, some unnamed investors bought exactly 30 million shares for $60 thousand. Even after the terrible crash from the last few weeks, these shares currently cost about $6.6 million.