Opexa Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: OPXA) may have just become the villain of Wall Street in emerging pharma and biotech. This stock more than doubled on Wednesday, on what was no official news but around positive chatter around its multiple sclerosis drug. Well, Opexa used the strength in the stock to unleash a secondary stock offering to raise some needed cash.

The 12 million share offering priced at $1.50 per share. To prove how damaging this was to so many new investors hoping to get in on the next boom: Opexa’s gain on Wednesday was 131%. It was also on more than 24 million shares. Yahoo! Finance lists Opexa’s average daily volume as more than 568,000 shares, but that figure was highly skewed, based on three days including this day. It had been very frequent that Opexa did not even trade 100,000 shares in a day, and only two days in the past three months had volume of 1 million shares or more up until this week.

Some will say that the company was opportunistic and smart to use its strength to raise cash. Others will say that new investors got duped. The good news is that Opexa raised close to $18 million from the offering and all of the shares in the offering were sold by Opexa.

Before the effects of the secondary offering, Opexa had a market cap of a mere $12.25 million. That makes it insignificant as a company, outside of the fact that a bunch of day traders ran it up on Wednesday and then the stock just crushed a bunch of small retail holders who were hoping they were in on the next rags-to-riches story.

The use of proceeds section said:

Opexa intends to use the net proceeds from the offering to fund further clinical development of Tcelna in an ongoing Phase IIb clinical study of patients with Secondary Progressive MS as well as the expenses of its operations during such development and for general corporate purposes. Opexa may also use a portion of the net proceeds to repay all or a portion of its outstanding convertible secured promissory notes.

Shares are down 48% to $1.51, and Opexa’s 52-week trading range is $1.07 to $5.19. After less than 90 minutes of trading, some 13 million shares trade hands already.

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