For once I make an effort post.

Longfin ($LFIN) is a shady "fintech" (financial technology) company that IPO'ed on NASDAQ earlier this year. Before their IPO they jumped on the crypto blockchain bandwagon and announced they'd acquired a crypto company (with zero revenue). Over 3 days their stock price catapulted from $5 a share as high as $142 a share in three days.

Meet Venkat S Meenavalli, their CEO:

A company like this wouldn't be complete without a loony CEO. Here's the first CNBC interview he did:

https://youtu.be/31eI-O1ZW1E

And here's a sound board someone made: https://lfinleaks.github.io/Hey-/#/

With this thing looking like an obviously overvalued scam, the sharks smelled blood in the water and shorts & puts (ways to profit off of a stock price decrease) on the stock skyrocketed. Three days later their stock tanked back down to $41. Since then, they'd been bouncing around the $30-40 a share range.

The thing with high levels of short interest, is that it can create a "short squeeze", which leads to a stock shooting back up as there's now such a high premium on borrowing the stock to short it. In mid-march, this caused LFIN's stock value to jump back up 100% over ten days. At the obscene price of $72, short interest rushes back in and it tanks back down to ~$10 in a week. Another short squeeze starts up and it's price starts jumping again.

On Thursday, the CEO gives another nutty CNBC interview as it's also been announced that they're under investigation by the SEC:

https://youtu.be/dbiLT9-0Ldg

Choice quote: "I am a profitable company!"

Also he basically admits to insider trading with his wife.

Enter yesterday:

Their stock shoots up by 50% in the first half hour of trading. Suddenly NASDAQ pulls the plug and halts trading. Now, with how volitile Longfin's stock price has been since it's IPO, it's been halted many times under the halt code LUDP. When a stock price jumps up or down too fast, it gets put on a five minute time out, in hopes that traders will chill out.

This time it was different, the halt code read T12. This is the equivalent of a stock being called to the principal's office. Basically, NASDAQ is requesting more information from the company before trading can resume. The two most common scenarios for this is either the company was just bought out by another company or the stock has been trading at such a low price that NASDAQ is kicking it off it's stock exchange.

No one was buying out the company and it wasn't trading for pennies either. It got halted because the SEC obtained a court order related to insider trading:

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-61

The fallout drama so far:

You of course have your suckers who "believe in the company" or those who just wanted in on it's recent crazy jump in value. These guys bought shares and they're the most screwed. For some schadenfreude I recommend:

https://twitter.com/BagholderQuotes

https://stocktwits.com/symbol/LFIN

There's another group that's stuck in purgatory though, owners (yours truly included) of LFIN put options. Put options are another way besides shorting to profit off of a company's stock value decreasing. Basically each put is paying a premium for the right to sell 100 shares of a stock up to a specific future date for a set price. So the more the stock value decreases below that set price, the put contract becomes more valuable.

These puts have an expiration date and just like the stock, cannot be traded during a stock halt. There's a lot of puts that expire on 4/20 (blaze it!). The T12 halt that the stock is under lasts up to 10 business days. No one is really sure if it will resume before the halt expires. With the SEC involved, there's potential for the stock to be held up even longer. So owners of the 4/20 put options (again yours truly included) are either sitting on a potential gold mine if trading resumes in time or for them to expire worthless or to attempt a very risky, manual, and complicated process where you execute the put option and hope it's worth more than the stock price once trading finally resumes.

Here's a handful of Reddit thread with everyone trying to figure out what the hell is going on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/8a9uqr/lfin_t12_halted/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RobinHood/comments/8aa2kl/i_have_put_options_on_a_company_longfinlfin_that/

https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/8af3zl/official_lfin_put_holders_thread/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/8a9skv/did_the_nasdaq_freeze_longfin/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/8aabpm/longfin_funeral_sponsored_by_stockholder_class/

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/8aaexk/sec_halted_my_longfin_calls_this_is_extremely/

And for a last stroke of irony, El Fin (LFIN) is Spanish for THE END