Nikola Hype Collapses, Shares Plunge, CEO Out

The Nasdaq might be down 12% from its high on September 2, and Apple might be down 21% from its high on September 1. But the day-trader nuttiness – the new technical terms is “Robinhood traders” though they may trade on any platform, not just on Robinhood – isn’t letting up, and hedge funds might still be trying to front-run them and fleece them for a quick buck.

And that’s a huge temptation for a tiny Chinese company that installs solar-panel projects in various countries, with just $97 million in annual revenues in 2019, and nothing but annual losses going back years, whose penny stock, issued by a shell company in the Cayman Islands, is traded on the Nasdaq.

And so now the company launched this scheme that ruthlessly took advantage of these “Robinhood traders” to drive up its share price – and boy, did the Robinhood traders blow our ears off today, “literally,” so to speak 

This is how it worked: SPI Energy, headquartered in Hong Kong, issued a press release this morning in which it said that it – the tiny solar-panel project installer – would launch an EV company, called EdisonFuture, and suddenly manufacture EVs.

But Robinhood traders saw to it that these are not normal times. Upon the announcement, its shares spiked by 4,387% from $1.04 at the close yesterday to $46.67 at 2:06 pm today, for just the briefest moment before collapsing by 71%, giving up over two-thirds of those gains and closing at $13.28.