MyDx - Another way to play the marijuana space

This blog is starting to generate some emails, nothing huge, one or two a week.  Last Wednesday Zane wrote and asked me if I'd consider looking into a company called MyDx Inc that trades OTCQB under the appropriate symbol MYDX.OB.  They have created a hand held analyzer that detects chemicals in, you guessed it, Mary Jane. as well as food, water and even air.  It can work in tandem with a smart phone and a downloadable free application.  

I've already written about another interesting Cannabis play in Rocky Mountain High Brands (RMHB.OB) and their Hemp Infused energy drinks, so I figured.....what the hay.  Or perhaps:  "What the hemp" might be a better way of putting it.

Cannabis, Hemp, Marijuana, call it what you want, the sector is getting a lot of...uhm, Buzz.  With California voting in favour of legislation and Canada poised to do the same at the federal level this spring it stands to reason that public companies in this space are going to be attracting a lot of attention.

I'm not going to go in depth on the fundamentals here, regular readers already know my opinion.  I consider all fundamental data to be at least weeks and often times months old. Hence in my view its already "baked" into the share price.  Okay okay, I'll slow down on the Wacky Tabacky quips....they're hard to resist.

MYDX closed this past Friday at .022 cents American, trading on the OTCQB as opposed to the non reporting Pink Sheets which I will not touch.  As of  October 12th of this year there were 150.5 million shares outstanding, giving the company a Market Cap of about $3.3 million.  

There is some promotion going on, which as I've often pointed out is to be expected with development stage companies.  They're profiled at CFN Media Group, a website that specializes in promoting the overall Cannabis space.

http://www.cannabisfn.com/mdc/mydx-inc/

They haven't been around for a long time, with the chart showing trading starting in April of 2015 in the $2 to $3 range.  That's quite a drop, all the way down to just a couple of pennies.  You can see for yourself here:

Two things pop out.  One obviously is the big drop in the PPS, and the second is the explosion of volume starting in September and carrying through to the present.  

According to news released by the company, their application was the number one downloaded free App in IOS App Store in the medical category:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mydx-one-app-rockets-top-141100654.html

There's another reason however why I think volume has exploded, and that reason is short selling. As might be expected with a stock trading for less than one single nickel, short interest has been very low....until recently that is.  Up until September the reported numbers of shares borrowed and sold into the market was only a few thousand, forty odd thousand as recently as July.

And then it shot up to almost 200K at the end of August and then to a high of over 2 million as recently as September 30th.  The most recent update has short interest just shy of 1 million current up to Oct. 15th.  So short interest shot up in tandem with the explosion in trading volumes in other words.

That suggests to me that MYDX is now fully "in play".  In my opinion this stock has attracted the attention of the real players, and as such I expect there to be a lot of volatility.  High frequency traders scalping large quantities for small % gains, retail investors buying and holding, penny flipping types riding momentum on swing trades.  And given the minuscule market cap, it strikes me that there is a lot of upside potential here.  

Now full disclosure.  As I write this I have no position in MYDX whatsoever, and as it says at the very bottom of this blog, I have not and will not ever accept payment in any form to write about any stock. With that being said I may very well open up a position in this company, perhaps within the next 48 hours.  

Do note that penny stocks are incredibly high risk investment vehicles.  It is quite possible that one may lose some or all of their investment when buying OTC stocks, so please take special care here. My regular readers know my favourite saying: "Nobody ever went broke by taking profits".  In my view stocks like MYDX are only suitable for risk capital, that is to say money that one can afford to lose.  

Please do your own DD and research and examine your own objectives, be they long term, short term or somewhere in between.  And good luck.