Wizard World Inc (OTCBB:WIZD) Suffers A Severe Crash
Last Friday the stock of Wizard World Inc (OTCBB:WIZD) crashed hard wiping nearly a quarter of its value. The ticker opened at $0.71 per share but by the time the trading day came to an end it had dropped to $0.56. The last time WIZD traded at such prices was way back in August, last year. The crash took place on a selling volume of over 834 thousand shares, which is more than 12 times higher than the monthly average volume of 67 thousand traded shares.
There isn’t an immediately obvious reason for the sell-off. The last official PR published by the company is two months old and it announced that WIZD is going to present at the LD Micro Invitational that took place at the start of June. As for the financials of the company Wizard World is definitely a step ahead of the majority of the other pennystock ventures.
The company is a producer of Comic Cons and pop culture conventions and it achieved profitability for 2014. During the first quarter of 2015 WIZD held 7 events compared to the 3 for the same period last year and generated over $6.1 million in revenues. The cash reserves of the company are equally as impressive with WIZD having $5.2 million in cash at the end of March. The growing number of conventions did leave a negative impact on the bottom line though – Wizard World reported a quarterly net loss of $981 thousand when they finished the same period in 2014 with a net income of $692 thousand.
The company diversified its revenue streams recently by launching the streaming platform ConTV, in conjunction with Cinedigm Corp (NASDAQ:CIDM), and the monthly subscription-based box service called Comic ConBox that will be shipped at the end of each month and will contain various comic-related items. At the end of April WIZD announced that the first edition of the Comic ConBox was sold out in just six days.
WIZD is definitely an interesting pennystock venture that is still growing – as a whole the company has 27 planned events for 2015. There are some risks however that should be taken into account before deciding whether to invest or not. At the start of June Wizard World, along with FansTang, held a convention in China. This was the first venture for the company outside of North America and the title sponsor for the event was none other than Coca Cola. The problem is that the convention did not go according to plan and let’s just say that some of the people that attended the con were left rather disappointed.
