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Investing noob here.

TOPS stock (TOP Ships Inc) on the NASDAQ is currently trading at $0.11 per share but it used to be billions per share.

Did they continuously raise so much capital that investors kept getting diluted? Is this a result of stock splitting? I really cannot fathom that stock's early valuation.

Could such a monumental plunge happen to current high value stocks such as Amazon, Tesla, or BRK.A?

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    Interesting that there is pretty much zero information about that company on the web which is not related to their stock. Looks like an investment scam.
    – Philipp
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 18:58
  • googling finds this: reddit.com/r/investing/comments/g0q5kh/…
    – Vicky
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 19:11
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    @Philipp Their website (topships.org) is one of the most impressive scam websites I've ever seen. They list their management team, contact numbers, and everything. I guess if a middle-man is raking in millions then spending some dough on the site is a worthwhile investment. Seems like a pure gambling penny stock; more volatile than SPXS and SPXL.
    – MonkeyZeus
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 19:20
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    Note that the millions or billions per share you currently see on historical price charts represent split-adjusted prices. The (old) shares of TOPS have probably never traded on NASDAQ at millions or billions per share.
    – Flux
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 5:53
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    @MonkeyZeus - Splits are reflected on all historical data. However, an occasional charting site gives you the option to look at unadjusted data.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 18:08

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It's even worse than you think. The high price for TOPS in 2004 was $173,502,005,248

The reason for this absurd price is that TOPS has had many, many reverse splits. Here are the ones since 2008:

  • 03/20/2008 1 for 3
  • 06/24/2011 1 for 10
  • 04/21/2014 1 for 7
  • 02/22/2016 1 for 10
  • 05/11/2017 1 for 20
  • 06/23/2017 1 for 15
  • 08/03/2017 1 for 30
  • 10/06/2017 1 for 2
  • 03/26/2018 1 for 10
  • 08/22/2019 1 for 20

If you hypothetically owned 7,560,000,000 shares at the outset, after all of these reverse splits, you'd own one share.

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  • Wow, nice! May I ask where you found this data?
    – MonkeyZeus
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 16:11
  • So is this stock nothing more than a scheme to make amateur traders think the stock is skyrocketing so people jump on the bandwagon while the string-pullers sell off?
    – MonkeyZeus
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 16:14
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    Having seen this many times over the years, I knew that the cause was reverse splits. Then, it was just a matter of googling "TOPS reverse split history". The first one on the list showed 9 splits. It's not a scheme at all. It's just a function of how data is adjusted when stock splits occur.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 16:18
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    And the reason for the absurd price is that before 2018 the company only had a few thousand shares (I can't find the exact numbers). So "owning 756 million shares at the outset" would not be possible; you would have needed to own the entire company thousands of times over.
    – Brady Gilg
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 17:54
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    Owning 766 million shares was not possible nor was it possible for a share to trade at $173,502,005,248. This is all a function adjusted data due to 9 reverse splits.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 18:04

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