Breaking News Catapults Petrotech Oil & Gas Inc (OTCMKTS:PTOG) Up The Charts
About an hour before the start of Friday’s session Petrotech Oil & Gas Inc (OTCMKTS:PTOG) dropped a massive bombshell. Apparently, while doing pre testing work on one of their wells in Texas, they stumbled upon some free flowing oil. We’ve been around penny stocks for long enough to know that this sort of announcement is bound to cause quite a stir and you can see from the chart on the right that it did. PTOG opened Friday’s session above its previous close, went all the way up to $0.04 per share, after which it settled down to a more realistic values. When the closing bell rang, the ticker was standing at $0.026 or around 62% above the previous value. Predictably, the trading volume was also massive and everyone’s extremely excited. We? We’re not on the edge of our seats just yet and there are a couple of reasons for this.
The first one is pretty obvious from PTOG‘s chart. The stock performance has been rather dreary over the last couple of months. The last time we wrote about them for example, was on May 23 and if you have a quick look at our article, you will see that back then, PTOG‘s price was hovering around $0.15 per share. Now, just two months later, even after the impressive run from Friday, it’s standing at less than $0.03 which means that around 82% of the value has disappeared. This is not the sort of performance expected from the next big thing in the oil and gas industry but who is to blame?
Well, the pumpers certainly played their parts in the massive descend. More than 60 emails have been received since our last article went online and that’s quite a lot. What is peculiar about the whole touting, however, is the fact that the promoters seem to be always one step ahead, starting their campaigns a day or two before an exciting new announcement. Now they’re all over PTOG once again and the fact that the first alerts arrived on Thursday suggests that the people standing behind the newsletters might have had some insider information about the all-important discovery of oil.
Whether that’s the case or not remains unknown, but despite the good news and despite Friday’s respectable gains, we’re still somewhat skeptical about the long-term performance of the ticker. Not least because PTOG‘s latest financial statement looks absolutely dismal. Here’s a summary of the most important figures as of March 31:
- cash: $54
- current assets: $5,554
- current liabilities: $1.2 million
- no revenue since inception
- quarterly net loss: $72 thousand
The report also tells us that just four months ago, PTOG had no more than two full-time employees and we can’t see how that amount of workforce correlates to a company that is about to make any sort of impact in a business as competitive as the oil and gas exploration industry. PTOG do say that they plan on hiring ten more people before March 2014 but even if they do (which, with only $54 in the bank remains questionable) we’re still not convinced that they’ll manage to turn their properties into a steady stream of revenues.
Even though we’re a bit skeptical at the moment, we’ll be sure to check out PTOG‘s future financial statements and if they do manage to present some solid figures in them, we might be persuaded to believe that they really are onto something. Until then, just like other mineral exploration penny stocks like Sanborn Resources Ltd (OTCBB:SANB), North American Oil & Gas Corp (OTCBB:NAMG) and Grid Petroleum Corp (OTCMKTS:GRPR), PTOG remains nothing more than a small cap venture with a dreadful financial statement and a lot of artificial hype around it.
