Update On Speculation In the Stock of the Swiss National Bank (SNBN)

This is an extra-special type of lunacy.

From Wolf Street:

Special Pump-and-Dump Scheme Spikes to High Heaven  
 But the Swiss National Bank is just an innocent bystander.

The publicly traded shares of Swiss National Bank (SNBN) rose 5.7% on Thursday and closed at a new high of 4,449 Swiss francs. They have skyrocket 133% since July 19. And that’s just the last two months of an exponential spike. Who’re the lucky ones that own the shares of the SNB?

• The Cantons: 55.9%
• Public Cantonal banks: 18.4%
• Other public institutions: 0.5%
• Private shareholders: 25.3% (100,000 shares).

With only 100,000 shares being publicly traded on thin volume, it’s easy to drive up the price. Some well-placed hype and a modest amount of buying pressure can trigger big moves that then inspire other speculators to jump in and chase the small number of shares.
From July 19 until August 21, shares jumped by 912 francs, or 48%. Then on August 22, they were hyped in an article in the German daily, Die Welt. Here are some of the nuggets:

• “The dream of every company: to make money out of nothing.”
• The SNB “seems to have found the world formula.”
• “It creates value out of nothing.”
• “The private saver can participate in the central bank.”....

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...The scheme has been going on for a while. This weekly chart shows how these shares soared 168% since April 2017 and 326% since April 2016.

The hype is this: The SNB has become a hedge fund since it decided in January 2015 to print Swiss francs — for which there is huge global demand — and buy mostly bonds and stocks denominated in euros and dollars. The idea is to put a lid on the franc by selling it....

...MORE

Do read on, the denouement is worthy of Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds which reminds me of a snappy little paper on the British Railway Mania that we linked to in:
The Time Charles ('Popular Delusions...') Mackay Thought 'This Time it's Different'

We linked to Wolf Street's September 11 piece in "So, Shares of the Swiss National Bank Are Up 89% Since Late July (SNBN)" but because we were three days late getting to it had to put an update in the intro:
Add a couple (dozen) percentage points to all the numbers quoted in this story, it was, after all, written way back on September 11.
SNBN  3,615.00 CHF up 115.00 (3.29%) on the day....