This is a Bit Scary and Much Bigger Than the Stock Mkt.

[Recyclersteve]

For those who don't really care about the stock market, please give me a few paragraphs to sound a potential cautionary tone...

Today is Wednesday (late) and I want to sound a potential cautionary tone about something that happened Monday and Tuesday in the stock market that could be a potentially big deal. Don't worry if you never heard of the stock, which is Cheetah Net Supply Chain Service (Symbol: CTNT). I never heard of them until a few days ago. Wait til you see what happened.

So, today is 5/22/24 (W) and the stock closed at $1.01, down 17 cents. What is the big deal, you ask?

I'm gonna start with the bottom line and backtrack to explain why I am concerned. Yesterday, I closed out my stock position (in the pre-market session) that I opened in after hours on Monday. I made a bit over $6,000 profit, which is great on the one hand, but frankly it was WAY TOO EASY and I am concerned that there is the potential for lots of people to get hurt on this. Allow me to explain a bit more.

I've done many thousands of trades with my own personal money over the years and experienced just about everything there is to experience. Normally when I have a nice trade I like to say a thank you prayer, but this one seemed like it was demanding more than that. I apologize if I am jumping all over the place a bit. When this sinks in, you will likely begin to realize why this was truly bizarre and really shouldn't have been allowed to happen.

Above I said the stock closed today at $1.01. Consider the following history and please realize that there was no real news to justify the movements that you are reading about.

CHEETAH NET SUPPLY CHAIN SERVICE (TKR: CTNT) PRICING:

5/22/24 (W): Closed at $1.01, down 17 cents
5/21/24 (T): $1.18, down $13.58 (down a whopping 92.0%)- was as low as 86 cents during the regular session
5/20/24 (M): $14.76 up $3.96 (up a sizable 36.7%)- in after hours Monday the stock peaked at a whopping $45.00 per share

5/13/24 (M): $1.19, down 6 cents

So, looking at the info above you can see that a no-name auto and truck parts business with only 18 employees total (which shouldn't even be allowed to trade IMHO) went in just 9 days
from $1.19 to $45.00 and back down to 86 cents.

If you had news, and it would have needed to be more than spectacular, I can see where maybe a really gullible and filthy rich optimist could tell a bunch of their friends and perhaps bid the stock up sharply. Remember, this is a stock that probably nobody here even heard of merely a few days to a week ago. This isn't someone who discovered a cure for cancer. They are in the car parts biz.

I saw the stock Monday in after hours AFTER it hit $45 and was coming down. I dug a bit deeper and realized this would almost certainly continue to come down and fast. Bottom line I shorted 800 shares of the stock at $20.05 (less than 1/2 what it was 1-2 hours earlier) because I was SOOO CERTAIN that it would continue to decline and sharply. I put in an order to get out at $12.54 on Monday night and woke up early Tuesday morning to find out that I did get out at $12.54 after all. This is just like buying at $12.54 and selling at $20.05- I just reversed the order by selling (selling short if you will) first. So I ended up making right around 60% profit in just 13 hours, which, on the one hand was fantastic and I'm thankful for that. On the other hand, I'm quite certain there were people who got clobbered on this. What if you bought something anywhere near the $45 high and saw that less than 24 hours later the stock was trading millions of shares for less than $1. How would you feel?

My personal best guess estimate is that someone is trying to experiment with artifical intelligence (AI) on stocks to see how much they can artificially push them both up and down. If true, this is sad. Imagine, there will be others getting tools to manipulate stocks as well. Some will want to have the stocks go up- others will want the opposite. The battles could be pretty epic.

NOTE: I'm not trying to sound an alert on all stocks- at least not yet. But if you see something you never heard of before moving in absolutely incredible fashion ($1 to $45 to 86 cents in a few days with no apparent news to explain the movement definitely fits the bill), I'd be thinking along the lines of "this could be too good to be true."

I sent a cautionary note to dozens of personal friends and one responded with something that set off a few alarm bells. Just the prior day, this same thing basically happened to ANOTHER no name stock. MTC (MMTec), which essentially did something very similar just the day before. He says he bought MTC at $15ish in extended hours after it was rallying like crazy and looked poised to run some more. Unfortunately, in less than 24 hours he was forced to sell for less than $1 and he thinks it may take another year or so to earn back what he lost.

Now, keep in mind, I'm not saying people should be worrying about buying well known companies like Apple, Home Depot, Costco, Coca Cola, etc. BUT, if you find yourself drawn to a stock you never heard of that is really running fast, PLEASE USE EXTREME CAUTION and consider selling it short instead of buying it. You are unable to sell short in an account unless you have a margin (borrowing) feature, which rules out all retirement accounts. But if I heard that a loved one got sucked into a stock like either CTNT or MTC, frankly I'd feel sick.

This was the easiest and most obvious trade with a profit of $6,000 or more that I've made in a long time. That is great on the one hand, but scary when you think about what truly happened to the stock. I envision that somebody with lots of money said to somebody something like- "Go create me a fantastic system with artificial intelligence where I can literally manipulate stocks up and down at will. I'm willing to LOSE up to, say, $100 million to reach my goal. Ultimately, this will make me a lot of money." That the gyst of what I think is happening right now and frankly it is sad.

Also, I sent a personal message to Gary Kaltbaum of the Investor's Edge radio show just Tuesday. He probably got other comments from other people on the same stock because he took a 3-4 minute segment of his show on Tuesday (at about the 8 minute mark of his show at GaryK.com) to discuss this stock specifically. He sounds as concerned as I am, which is good. It is good to get this message out to a nationwide audience.

No, I am not a paranoid person. But, that said, occasionally something needs to be said. This was one of those times. Remember, if a stock is up 20% in a day because it announced record earnings, that could be totally justified. I'm talking about movements of thousands of percent in the absence of any real news.

Good luck to all. I am open to comments and suggestions below. Please add any other truly wild and unxeplained stock movements that you see. Also, please disregard anything where the stock never gets above $10 a share. A stock that goes from 5 cents to $2 in short order isn't that unusual.

[Lemon Thrower]

its just a penny stock that somehow got listed on nasdaq. manipulation of penny stocks has been a wall street practice for over a century, even before there was a nasdaq.

[68Camaro]

Seems like it would also be a good way to launder money. Buy a no name company, list it, manipulate the stock, convert dollars to shares, then shares back to clean dollars, exit leaving others holding the bag.