Jay Ritter

A golf company with $90,000 in sales was valued at $400 million. Its stock proceeded to crash. What happened?

On Aug. 15 Sacks Parente, a small putter outfit in California, announced the pricing of its IPO at $4 per share with 3.2 million shares available. Within hours, something remarkable—and something curious—immediately happened. The price soared to $32 a share, eventually closing at $29.67 for a 624-percent one-day gain. Something didn’t add up then. And still doesn’t now.

“This is definitely pretty extreme,” said Jay Ritter, the Joe B. Cordell Eminent Scholar Chair at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business.

Read more from Ritter in this story from Golf Digest