Cogent Communications, most known for their cheap metro ethernet services, nose dived today, down $11.59 a share or 53.39%. Not sure what’s the reason behind this. Cannot say if it has anything to do with their decision to sell more stock, and raise an additional $75 million in a public offering underwritten by Lehman Brothers and others. In March 2005, the company did a 1-for-20 reverse stock split in place and the latest offering will dilute existing shareholder value by about 10 percent, according to Washington Business Journal.
This offering is pretty darn important for Cogent which did $34.4 million in sales in the first quarter of 2005, but managed to lose $14.97 million. Its total operating expenses were $50.11 million, and cash on hand was down to about $21.67 million. Do the math? But that still doesn’t explain what happened to the stock today. Yahoo Message Boards indicate that pricing on the deal – about $20 a share might not be doable. If daily trade volumes are any indicator then someone has been dumping this stock.
COI’s downfall Tuesday helped crush deltathree (DDDC) as well. DDDC runs much of COI’s VoIP, in my analysis.
Cogent priced its secondary offering at 6.00, which explains the crash in the share price Tuesday (crash continuing Wednesday). Obviously, the pricing was not a well-kept secret, even though it was announced after the close Tuesday.
I commented on this stock on CNBC’s ‘Wake Up Call’ this morning, as our Early Warning Service had been generating ALERTS/FLAGS signalling deviant trading behaviour for several days.
You can see the details in the Case Studies section [free] on our web site.
As we say: “Some people know more than others.”
re the Cogent Case Study and Early Warnings mentioned earlier, the address is:
http://www.measuredmarkets.com/studies/coi-amx.php