Liquid Media (NASDAQ YVR) stock s up over 100% premarket this morning. It's true that prices in microcaps - YVR has a market capitalisation of $2 million only - can move like this. It doesn't take much buying to move the price in something so small after all. However, there does have to be a reason for this sort of price move.
Clearly, the precise and exact reason is that lots of people are now buying into Liquid Media. But then that just takes us one iteration back to why are lots of people buying into YVR stock? The answer there is, well, no one actually knows at present. There is that movement into the stock, there is volume - 6 million shares at our pixel time - so something is indeed happening. As to what, well “The company makes and distributes social impact-based film programming and curriculum to various audiences and markets through subscription-based video-on-demand streaming service.” To be honest here we don't think that's the sort of business that's going to find a radical re-evaluation of prospects overnight. Especially in the absence of any corporate announcements detailing interesting events.
Our supposition - and do please note that we're making an assumption based upon what we can see out there - is that this is the cause:
Liquid Media premarket trades from NASDAQ
The market in such a stock is always very thin indeed, little liquidity. The market liquidity soon after the opening of the premarket (at 4am) is always going to be very thin indeed again, a fraction of the normal trade. Yet here we've got a consistent stream of orders all for tiny sums (100 shares at 26 cents is only $26 an order) being repeated time and again. Almost as if someone was trying to boost that YVR share price during that time period of very limited liquidity.
We want to be careful here. If someone has actually planned this then it's illegal, it's a pump and presumably dump. But, get the price up, others follow thinking something must be happening, sell the now higher priced stock into that following demand. That would be market manipulation and people can get jail time for that.
On the other hand if this is uncoordinated - just people decide independently to buy YVR stock - then that's absolutely fine, it's just the market having its say.
We'll not say which of these two we think it is - or even the third possibility that there is some large announcement to come. It's just that if it were market manipulation, a pump and dump, then we'd expect to see large numbers of small purchases at that moment of least liquidity, early morning premarket. So, since we're seeing exactly that, large numbers of small orders early morning premarket we'll sit this one out.
