Saturday, January 08, 2005

ERHC (Or Something Like It) on Threshold Security List; Short Squeeze Due?

Environmental Remediation Funding? Shades of 1996!

The newly-required OTC BB Threshold Security List released Friday evening for the first time lists the names of stocks which are naked shorted in large quantities. The list inexplicably names Environmental Remediation Funding Corp., instead of Environmental Remediation Holding Corp., for reasons too arcane to guess.
The Funding Corp. name was that of our company when it was bought out in 1996 for 2.4 million shares, and which in a series of name changes then became Valley Ventures, Inc., Regional Air Group and finally the ERHC we know and sometimes love.

The appearance on the list indicates that at least 3 million shares are being held by investors as part of a short sale. To be on the list, the naked-shorted stock must be a quantity larger than 10,000 shares and represent a minimum of .05 percent (one-half of one percent) of all outstanding shares.

The criteria for including a company's name on the Threshold Security List is that there be at least five consecutive days where one-half of one percent of the outstanding stock is owed to brokers for delivery and settlement. Usually, the shares are not delivered because they don't exist. That happened because of sloppy record-keeping and SEC indifference that allowed trading in vast quantities of stock without any underlying certificates, and often the Nasdaq stocks were shorted in volumes greater than the number of existing shares.

The new Regulation SHO may mean, some optimistic traders say, a mammoth "short squeeze" as market makers scramble to get real shares to fill the short orders and investors resist selling them.

The listing of the Funding Corp. name warrants some research. There may still be a company out there named Environmental Research Funding Corp. that is publicly traded or at least reporting and holds the original shares that it was granted at the time of the sale, and is now shorting some of them.

The list is maintained by Nasdaq at http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/aspx/regsho.aspx.

2 comments:

tradertrades said...

In the list the stock symbol is ERHC, company name is E-- R-- Funding. I think it is our company.

...Joe Shea said...

Sometimes those infinitesmal details are meaningful, sometimes not. I suspect you're right, but I'd like to verify it somehow.