An obscure company that employs five people and appears to produce insignificant amounts of oil and natural gas from some wells in Appalachia has become the last day-trading craze fueled by Reddit, rising nearly 1,000% to become a $ 128 million company in question hours.
New Concept Energy Inc. was mentioned by retail traders on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum on a day when brokers, including Robinhood Markets, restricted trading in stocks like GameStop Corp. .
For a company that produces just 70 barrels of oil equivalent a day and has a board with an average age of 74, that was still enough to raise its shares by a whopping 959% to $ 25, the highest since 2000.
The short interest in New Concept Energy has fell to 0.3% of its 13% float earlier this month, according to data from S3 Partners.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the performance of meteroric shares on Thursday.
At the end of 2019, New Concept Energy had 153 gas producing wells and 44 non-producing wells, with mineral leases on 20,000 acres, according to filings.
The company lost 46 cents per share and revenue of $ 590,000 in 2019, according to its annual report.