Follow the Dotted Line: First Up-Then Down
The name is the game on Wall Street these days.</br></br>A growing number of small public companies are finding that adding ".com" to their name can send their stock soaring. For investors, however, these volatile highfliers pose some particular risks. Many have little or no current operations and don't file financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And often, the trading pop soon at least partly fizzles.</br></br>Take MIS International. Until January, this largely dormant little outfit traded on Nasdaq's OTC Bulletin Board (for stocks that don't qualify for Nasdaq itself) with daily volume as low as 2,000 shares and a price generally well south of 50 cents a share. The company then acquired a new Internet-oriented business plan and a new name, Cosmoz.com.</br></br>Presto! Trading volume rocketed to as much as six million shares a day and the price briefly hit $5, giving Cosmoz.com a market value of $200 million. Its price has since dropped back to about $2.</br></br>Not too shabby for a company that hasn't yet turned a profit, and whose only operating business so far is a recently purchased financial-markets-information Web site that generates about $200,000 a year in revenue. However, Cosmoz.com does have a "hip" and "catchy" name that "definitely contributed" to the recent stock-market interest, says Wilfred Shaw, chairman and chief executive. He adds that Cosmoz.com has plans to acquire "many Internet companies."