More than three dozen cannabis companies applied for the POT symbol on the Canadian Securities Exchange after it became available this week. Potash Corporation relinquished the symbol, and so many Canadian companies wanted it that the CSE ran a first-ever random lottery for the symbol. A small firm in Vancouver, Weekend Unlimited, won the ticker in the lottery.
The company formerly had the ticker YOLO, which stands for “you only live once.” Most sites like TradingView were still showing YOLO as the company’s ticker. In the 24 hours after it officially became POT, it surged 65%.
Pot Stock Almost Doubles after Winning Coveted Ticker Symbol
YOLO/POT (Weekend Unlimited) rose more than 90% in the 24-hour period.
At the time Bloomberg wrote on the subject earlier today, YOLO/POT was on the way up. By press time it had risen more than 90% over the 24-hour period. The stock market is a psychological game. Traders believe in brand recognition. The strategy is likely along these lines: as people come in and invest in the marijuana industry, one of the first symbols they will consider is POT.
In a prepared statement, Weekend Unlimited CEO Paul Chu says:
“Weekend Unlimited is thrilled to add the iconic POT trading symbol to its identity. As a fast-growing multi-state operator, Weekend Unlimited is developing lifestyle brands around recreational and wellness to help define the future of the cannabis industry. The POT sy+++mbol is a tremendous fit with our brand identity. […] The POT lottery served to raise the profile of Canada’s leadership in legal recreational cannabis and we believe it will also serve to raise Weekend Unlimited’s profile.”
“Weekend Unlimited was not on the list of 8 cannabis companies given a “buy” or “speculative buy” rating by Canaccord recently. Perhaps the only pot stock on the list with a memorable symbol is Curafleaf, whose ticker is CURA.
Other stock exchanges have POT symbols, but the CSE might be the only one where it is a cannabis company. The New Zealand exchange, for example, has POT – Port Of Tauranga NPV. According to Bloomberg, there may soon be another YOLO symbol on the New York Stock Exchange, created by AdvisorShares Pure Cannabis ETF.
Source
Author: P.H. Madore
Image Credit: Featured Image from Shutterstock
Pot stock analysts believe that the CBD industry is about to explode. The reason? The $867 billion Farm Bill, signed into law by US President Donald Trump on December 20, officially excluded all cannabis products with 0.3% or less THC from the Controlled Substances Act. (THC is the psychoactive element in marijuana that gets users “high.”)
CBD has medicinal uses and is already legal in many states, as is its psychoactive component. As a result, farmers anywhere in the United States can freely grow “hemp” for both industrial and medical purposes.
Several Pot Stocks Set to Explode
Charlotte’s Web is one of eight pot stocks that Canaccord thinks could go higher within the near future. | Source: Shutterstock
Canaccord Genuity, a wealth management firm and investment bank with offices all over the world, believes the effects of CBD legalization will be huge. They rated the following stocks as most promising in a note today:
Charlotte’s Web Holdings, Inc. (CWEB-CSE)
Canopy Growth Corporation (WEED-TSE)
Curaleaf Holdings, Inc. (CURA-CSE)
Liberty Health Sciences Inc. (LHS-CSE)
1933 Industries, Inc. (TGIF-CSE)
DionyMed Brands, Inc. (DYME-CSE)
KushCo. Holdings, Inc. (KSHB-OTC)
MJardin Group, Inc. (MJAR-CSE)
Of these, only Charlotte’s Web Holdings was given a firm “buy” rating. The others were categorized as “speculative buys.” The CNBC article on the subject lists the buy targets. In the case of CWEB, that price is $21 Canadian. At press time, CWEB was trading at $19.70, down from its 24-hour high of $20.73. If the advice of Canaccord is to be taken, that means there is still ample room to buy CWEB. However, do note that this article is not intended to be financial advice.
CWEB opened around $10 last August. It has now nearly doubled in value. If Canaccord is correct, it could have a lot of room for growth in the near future as American farmers begin harvest CBD.
The first-quarter report from Canaccord has a message from CEO David Davieu regarding the strategization of the firm going forward. Davieu notes that growth stocks may face a challenging environment in the coming quarters. As a hedge, the firm is moving heavily into cryptocurrency and cannabis companies.
“With signs that the economic backdrop could become more challenging for growth stocks, we anticipate that rising commodity prices will drive increased activities in the natural resource sectors, a historic area of strength for our firm. We also anticipate growing interest in non-traditional sectors where Canaccord Genuity has established a strong market position, such as cannabis and digital assets.”
Canaccord Going Heavy on Cannabis and Cryptocurrency
Canada legalized marijuana nationwide last year. Pot stocks from the United States’ neighbor to the north have been booming as a result. For example, CWEB opened in August 2018 around $10, and has in the meantime almost doubled its per-share price.
Canaccord is continuing their expansion into digital assets despite lingering doubts about a Bitcoin ETF. Their doubts were again confirmed earlier this month when a Bitcoin ETF application was summarily withdrawn.
The note acknowledges that the Food and Drug Administration has yet to get fully on board with CBD legalization, but Canaccord this is a temporary situation.
“While the FDA’s stance has added some initial caution by retailers looking to enter the CBD space, we believe this to be transient, and expect many mass market retailers to begin distributing CBD products over the course of 2019.”
Marijuana legalization has revitalized several economies in the United States, most notably Colorado, which saw a $66 million marijuana tax surplus in fiscal year 2015, the first full year of total legalization. More than 60% of Americans now support legalization of marijuana, paving the way for what may amount to a mandate for elected officials in coming years.
Source
Author: P.H. Madore
Image Credit: Featured Image from Shutterstock. CWEB chart from TradingView.com.
Renowned hedge fund manager Jeffrey Vinik has dismissed the pot stock craze, describing cannabis investment as overrated and likely to suffer from squeezed margins. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box on January 10, Vinik also revealed that bitcoin currently accounts for “zero percent” of his investment portfolio.
Returning to the hedge fund scene after a five-year hiatus, the Tampa Bay Lightning owner, who also holds minority stakes in the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club, believes that an entry rush into cannabis investments will create a situation where market demand is overserved, and margins become too small to be profitable.
In his words:
I won’t say zero, but my guess is that they’re overhyped. There’s going to be too much competition, margins are going to come down, [and] nobody’s going to make money.
Rosy Cannabis Stock Predictions Versus Vinik’s Bearish Outlook
Tilray, the poster child of the pot stock bubble, has a price chart that looks more like it belongs to a cryptocurrency than a publicly-traded company.
If anyone has worthwhile experience in predicting stock performance, it would be Vinik whose hedge fund Vinik Asset Management returned an average of 17 percent per annum from 1996 to 2013. His prediction, however, is in stark contrast to the cannabis industry outlook put forward by Vivien Azer and Michael Lavery of Cowen and Piper Jaffray, respectively.
Both analysts have picked Canopy Growth and Tilray to lead the space in 2019 amidst a projected market surge that will see the sector achieve a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming decade.
Vinik, on the other hand, believes that such optimism is itself a cause for concern as it will lead to an unprecedented entry rush due to pot’s relatively low barrier to entry. Over time, as more and more investors come into the space and demand remains more or less stagnant, Vinik predicts that cannabis will thus become a stagnant-volume, low-margin space.
Vinik’s wider economic outlook is not quite so pessimistic, however. Speaking on Squawk Box, he revealed that believes that despite ongoing turbulence, stocks could embark on a multi-year uptrend across amidst good economic growth and low inflation. In his opinion, tech stocks specifically are in the mid stages of a bull market, which means that regardless of short-term retracements, the asset values will remain bullish in the long term.
In his words:
My belief is that we’re in a secular bull market. In retrospect — I didn’t know it at the time — it started in 2009 and if I had to guess, we’re halfway through it, driven by good economic growth and low inflation.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has issued its first cryptocurrency-related disciplinary action, charging Timothy Tilton Ayre, a broker in Agawam, MA., with securities fraud and the unlawful distribution of HempCoin, which the agency claims is an unregistered cryptocurrency security.
FINFRA, a not-for-profit organization overseen by the SEC to author rules and enforce compliance of federal securities laws, has accused Ayre of trying to entice people to invest in Rocky Mountain Ayre Inc. (RMTN) through the purchase of HempCoin, which Ayre claimed was “the first minable coin backed by marketable securities,” from Jan. 2013 to Oct. 2016, according to the complaint.
The agency claims Ayre made fraudulent statements about the finances of RMTN, which was traded over the counter and quoted on OTC Markets group’s Pink Market.
Misrepresentations Cited
FINFRA further claims that, in June 2015, Ayre purchased the coin’s rights and repackaged it as a security that was backed by RMTN as a common stock. He referenced HempCoin as “the world’s first currency to represent equity ownership” in a publicly traded company, FINFRA claims, assuring investors that each coin was worth the equivalent of 0.10 shares of RMTN common stock.
Through late 2017, investors mined in excess of 81 million HempCoin security tokens, buying and selling them on two crypto exchanges, the complaint claims. In addition, Ayre never registered HempCoin nor applied for a registration exemption.
Ayre also defrauded investors by giving false information and omissions concerning RMTN from Jan. 2013 through Oct. 2016, according to FINRA. He neglected to disclose the illegal distribution of HempCoin and his creation of the asset, and also gave numerous misleading and false representations in the company’s financial statements, the complaint states.
The complaint initiates FINFRA proceedings for which findings have yet to be determined. The complaint does not constitute any decision concerning the allegations. The party named in the complaint is entitled to request a hearing in front of a FINFRA disciplinary panel. Remedies can include a suspension or bar from the securities trade, a censure, a fine, or a surrender of gains related to the violation.
It turns out that the cannabis publication High Times is accepting cryptocurrency for its ongoing initial public offering (IPO) after all.
The publication announced at the beginning of August that it would accept bitcoin and ethereum for its IPO, but later walked back that announcement in an August 13 filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as previously reported by CoinDesk.
Despite the move, however, bitcoin appears to have remained as a payment option on the company’s investment page.
When reached for comment, High Times representative Jon Cappetta confirmed that the company is, in fact, accepting bitcoin and ethereum as payment options. Cappetta told CoinDesk that the regulatory filing was made “to make the SEC happy.”
“Yes, technically we are accepting bitcoin and ethereum,” Cappetta told CoinDesk. However, High Times is not taking or holding any cryptocurrencies – rather, a third-party processor called Fund America is taking the two cryptocurrencies and converting into U.S. dollars, which the company will then receive.
“On the legal side, it’s a lot of jargon. There’s no real easy way to spell it out. They issued the release to make the SEC happy,” he said.
He explained:
“We’re accepting [cryptocurrencies] as a payment option, but technically Fund America takes the bitcoin and ethereum … It’s similar to the way if we were doing an international IPO, and we were accepting the pound or the euro, those guys aren’t accepting that money, they’re converting it to [dollars].”
The reason for the earlier walk-back was due to concerns expressed by the SEC after the company initially said it would accept bitcoin, which mainly revolved around whether High Times would directly receive cryptocurrencies, he said.
“The reason we got slapped by the SEC last time is because we were accepting it … similar to a credit card processor … [however], it gets transferred to cash and we get that, we’re not explicitly holding [cryptocurrencies],” he said.
High Times’ IPO itself is going well, Cappetta said, and the company is looking at a direct listing as a result.
“The Regulation A [fundraising] is going to close on the 12th of this month, and then from there we will begin the listing process,” he said.
High Times Holding Corp, a New York-based media group advocating for cannabis usage, has decided against accepting bitcoin in its initial public offering (IPO), according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dated Aug. 13.
The SEC filing states that the initial announcement made two weeks ago, in which the company had said it would accept cryptocurrencies for its IPO, was “distributed in error.”
At the beginning of August, CCN reported that High Times was accepting cryptocurrency for its IPO — which it claimed would have made it the first stock offering ever to accept investments in digital assets.
According to the report, the offering was compliant with SEC Regulation A+ — a framework which allows small businesses raise up to $50 million of funding — and it also stated that the company had begun receiving cryptocurrency investments.
At the time, High Times CEO Adam Levin had said the company was “taking another step into the future” by making it possible for investors who own cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum to be part of the “public capital raise.” Levin went further to describe cryptocurrency as the currency of the future that has “created a new investor base across the world.”
The Aug. 13 filing with the SEC runs contrary to the announcement made two weeks ago. The company has now rescinded its statement about accepting bitcoin as a form of payment from investors for stock in the company.
The new filing reads, “This press release was distributed in error as the Company will not be accepting bitcoin as payment for shares. As provided in the Company’s subscription agreement related to the offering, the Company will only be accepting check, credit card, ACH or wire transfer as payment for subscription to shares.”
While the recent filing doesn’t reference ethereum, which was mentioned in the initial announcement, it is safe to assume they won’t be accepting that asset either.
Cryptocurrencies are seen by many as an alternative to cannabis-related payment issues that makes it difficult for customers to make purchases with their credit or debit cards. The industry suffers from hostility from the banks and has become a target for thieves due to the large amount of cash kept on site.
Here at Dollar Destruction, we endeavour to bring to you the latest, most important news from around the globe. We scan the web looking for the most valuable content and dish it right up for you! The content of this article was provided by the source referenced. Dollar Destruction does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. As always, we encourage you to perform your own research!
Is Fomo3D an incisive critique, a scam, or a little of both?
On its face, Fomo3D is a straightforward game of chance: Players have 24 hours to buy in to a pot, the lion’s share of which goes to the last buyer to get in under the buzzer. Every time a player buys in, 30 seconds is added to the clock, which caps at 24 hours, and the next buy-in becomes more expensive. Players can buy in as many times as they want, either all at once to bump up the clock or at the last possible moment, thus winning the pot.
The very first round of Fomo3D began July 8 with no money in the pot. As of this writing, there are two hours left on the clock. Buy-in has risen from less than 49 cents to $2.22, and with more than 34 million buy-ins, the pot is worth almost $9 million. How this ends, no one is really sure.
Far from just gambling, Fomo3D is an incisive critique of cryptocurrency and the hype surrounding it. All of the game’s transactions are conducted in and built on top of Ethereum, a decentralized computing system that has its own cryptocurrency and contract functions. The idea is that players can feel confident that Fomo3D will play out honestly because Ethereum is based on open-source, distributed ledgers and contracts through which everyone can see where the money is, when it should be paid out, and to whom. But that isn’t true of every cryptocurrency venture.
“Cryptocurrency as a whole is 99.9 percent get-rich-quick schemes from projects that will never deliver,” says “Justo,” one of the four pseudonymous developers of Fomo3D, who are collectively known as Team JUST. Reached via the online messaging platform Discord, Justo declined to reveal any other personal information (including their gender) or their collaborators, whom they say they have never met in real life.
Fomo3D beckons you to play, then ridicules you fortrying.
“Cryptocurrency itself isn’t a real investment as much as it’s a speculative toy,” Justo continues. “Our game takes that to the next level.”
From form to functionality, Team JUST designed Fomo3D to both entice and caution. The entire game is intentionally framed around the concept of an “exit scam” (the game’s URL is exitscam.me; playing it is described as “exit scamming”; its tagline is “All the Fun of an Exit Scam,” with “Fun” flashing as “Fear”), in which a con artist collects payment for goods and skips town before delivery is due. More recently, the term has been used to describe cryptocurrency companies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in initial coin offerings, only to disappear.
Fomo3D evokes the mad rush for cryptocurrency by investors who hardly understand the technology or its risks. The game’s language and imagery simultaneously cultivate players’ greed and undercut their hopes. The button to purchase a key (a game ticket, essentially) updates with the handle of the most recent buyer, incorporated into messages like “X is trying to take everything, stop them!”; “Getting out of wage slavery is within your grasp, just beat Y, you can do it”; and “Z would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those pesky kids and your key purchase.” At the same time, the game’s symbol is an upside-down pyramid, and even its name is a joke, playing on the slang acronym for “fear of missing out.” Fomo3D beckons you to play, then ridicules you for trying, blinding you with dollar signs along the way.
Team JUST is also using Fomo3D to ask a few probing philosophical questions. On a webpage introducing the game, the designers call it “a psychological social experiment in greed” and “some form of evil super-science,” and Justo describes it as “just a trick of human psyche” on Discord.
What they mean is clear upon considering the full implications of Fomo3D’s design. Because more time is added to the clock each time a player buys a key, the only way for the game to end is when players stop trying to win, which is unlikely, considering how much money is at stake. And because each key purchased raises the price of the next one, more and more money is going to be at stake, incentivizing players to invest even more in hopes of winning. Furthermore, as the game runs on Ethereum, which is decentralized, Team JUST claims that it cannot be tampered with by anyone, including the designers—nor can it be stopped, short of all 10,000-plus Ethereum nodes around the world going down simultaneously. That would not only make the nearly $9 million worth of cryptocurrency that is indeed tied up in Fomo3D inaccessible, but it would also jeopardize all of Ethereum, which Justo estimates is valued at $42 billion. In other words, Ethereum is not going down.
While Team JUST is steadfast in their claims that Fomo3D’s mechanics cannot be altered and that the pot cannot be usurped by anyone but the game’s winner, others are not so sure. Developers familiar with blockchain technology have examined the game’s programming and found issues. Péter Szilágyi, an Ethereum developer, published one vulnerability, which allows exploiters to siphon “airdrops,” or minipots that are randomly awarded with the purchase of each key. (Justo attributes this to “the lack of consistent and understandable documentation” for Ethereum’s security requirements; Szilágyi declined to comment.) The members of Team JUST say there’s nothing they can do to patch it. Other unintentional exploits may come up, but critics are also looking at backdoors by which the designers could run away with the pot. For its part, the Ethereum Foundation, which supports the research and development of the platform, declined to discuss Fomo3D. Ethereum external relations lead Joseph Schweitzer says, “We don’t comment on individual applications being built on top of the platform.”
When asked directly if Fomo3D really is a scam, Justo answers, “I mean, if it was an actual exit scam, it would be great too, right?”
And they’ve got a point. Because, at the end of the day, if they ran away with everything, could you really blame them? In so many ways, they were telling you that this was a scam all along.
Here at Dollar Destruction, we endeavor to bring to you the latest, most important news from around the globe. We scan the web looking for the most valuable content and dish it right up for you! The content of this article was provided by the source referenced. Dollar Destruction does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. As always, we encourage you to perform your own research!
