Thursday 5 October 2017

If is smells like a scam....West High Yield

This morning a little magnesium company named West High Yield (TSXV:WHY) announced an agreement to sell its mining assets for USD$750 million.  Is anybody dumb enough to believe that a company with access to USD$750M is going to pay this amount for a company with a market cap of $21 millon and a working capital deficit of over $2 million at June 30/17?  Shockingly, the answer is YES!

After WHY re-opened for trading at noon EDT today, the stock shot up from $0.36 to as high as $3.75 per share.  It has since pulled back to $1.40 per share with almost 200,000 shares traded.

A bit of digging suggests no evidence that the buyer, Gryphon Enterprises, LLC, is a business sufficiently large enough to come up with USD$750M (or probably even 1% of that).  Also, I noticed that WHY issued 1,893,333 units only about a week ago for $0.30 per unit.  I doubt a company in the midst of negotiating an asset sale would do a financing, and a deal this size doesn't happen overnight.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.  This one walks like a scam and smells like a scam.  In my opinion, the regulators should have asked for more information from the issuer before allowing this stock to re-open for trading.

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