Matt Levine, Columnist

Cynk Makes the Case for Buying Friends, Naked Short Selling

Is Cynk a short-seller trap? Maybe? I don't know. I guess not? But wouldn't it be cool if it was?

July 11, 2014 at 9:56 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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I confess I had a feeling that not all was right with Cynk Technologies. Just a hunch that I had, that I mentioned repeatedly here and here and on Twitter and on television and to strangers on the subway. Something about a company with no revenues and a brilliant but undeveloped business model (buy friends on the Internet! friends not included) having a $4, 5, 6, whatever billion dollar market cap struck me as fishy.

This morning the Securities and Exchange Commission halted trading in Cynk "because of concerns regarding the accuracy and adequacy of information in the marketplace and potentially manipulative transactions in CYNK’s common stock." So I guess I was right? Everyone was right! I mean everyone who said anything about Cynk this week said either