Article this weekend in the WSJ Interactive Edition:
interactive.wsj.com
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Pint-Sized Oil Company's Claim Sparks Black-Gold Rush On-Line
By TERRI CULLEN
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
Is it black gold or fool's gold?
That's the question plaguing dozens of American International
Petroleum Corp. shareholders, who have been debating heatedly
on-line in recent weeks trying to decide whether they've stumbled
upon the next Exxon, or the next Bre-X...(body of article omitted)....
Long-suffering shareholders rushed on-line to crow about the news and
the stock's sudden lift-off. Mired in a narrow trading range near 50
cents a share for more than a year, its shares closed at 62.5 cents the day before American's announcement. After the announcement, the
stock jumped to $1 and a week later its shares surged to $3 on heavy
volume of 13.4 million shares. Since then, the stock has settled a bit, and closed Friday at $2.59375.
"Right now I'm in a state of shock," sputtered one recent posting on the Silicon Investor site. "Last week there were just a few of us talking about our little dog and here we have the price of the stock multiply ...in just a few days. I guess this qualifies us as lucky."
In the month of July alone, more than 1,000 messages were posted
about American's stock on the Silicon Investor site. And of the site's
350 folders for stocks trading under $5, the so-called penny stocks,
only 32 saw more activity than American's during that period. On
AOL's stock message boards, which tend to be dominated by
discussions of larger, more well-established stocks, upward of 500
messages have been exchanged regarding the pint-sized company...(body
of text omitted)....)
PaineWebber's Mr. Czaia agrees, "There doesn't seem to be too much disagreement that there's a substantial amount of oil in the concession in the region. The big questions are the cost of getting the oil out of the ground and transporting it, and what American will have to give away to get a partner to assist them to do it."
M.M. |
