by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:

#TheZooHasGoneNuts: One press release about an EV, but no money, no tech, no prototype, no facilities, no plans, no nothing. Getting pretty thick, even for our crazy times. SEC, are you awake?

The Nasdaq might be down 12% from its high on September 2, and Apple might be down 21% from its high on September 1. But the day-trader nuttiness – the new technical terms is “Robinhood traders” though they may trade on any platform, not just on Robinhood – isn’t letting up, and hedge funds might still be trying to front-run them and fleece them for a quick buck.

And that’s a huge temptation for a tiny Chinese company that installs solar-panel projects in various countries, with just $97 million in annual revenues in 2019, and nothing but annual losses going back years, whose penny stock, issued by a shell company in the Cayman Islands, is traded on the Nasdaq. It received a delisting notice on March 23 because its shares had been below $1 for 30 days in a row and because its market cap had dropped below $15 million. Given the Pandemic, the Nasdaq gave it till December to regain compliance.

And so now the company launched this scheme that ruthlessly took advantage of these “Robinhood traders” to drive up its share price – and boy, did the Robinhood traders blow our ears off today, “literally,” so to speak