to get their products into the general market.
AQES was one of the rare exceptions to this rule. After five years, AQES had gone from five dollars a share and ten million shares outstanding to $.00012 a share and one-hundred-billion shares outstanding. Darius had applied for and received permission for another shelf offering of sixty billion shares, allowing him the flexibility to issue the shares at his discretion. They had used the toxic financing firms for their own means. No one would look at AQES.BB and think twice about what had happened. As far as Wall Street was concerned, they were just another casualty of toxic financing.
When Darius had brought Dylan on board and explained his technology and a general outline of what he wanted to do, Dylan had immediately seen the potential to exploit the circumstances into an unimaginable fortune. Together they set in motion a plan that, if it succeeded, would overturn the very order of the financial world. Somehow they had been able to keep their secret, and now it was only two more weeks until they really began to shake things up.
As part of their compensation, each member of the team had been given one billion shares of AQES.BB. Dylan’s models predicted that once the technology was vetted and accepted as genuine, the share price would trade in excess of a thousand dollars a share. Aquarius Elemental Solutions would be the largest company, by market share, in the world. The six members of the team would be some of the richest people on the planet.
He almost chuckled, then tried to bring himself back in check. A lot could happen before that came to pass, so he had to remain cautious.
Dylan once more checked the filings with the SEC and other regulatory agencies. Everything must be in order. They were going to be making a lot of enemies shortly, and their enemies would not need any excuses to come after AQES. Currently Darius personally owned sixty billion shares of AQES.BB in his name. In an offshore hedge fund set up for Darius, they had been soaking up the excess AQES.BB shares for the past several years. This hedge fund now owned another thirty-five billion shares of AQES.BB stock, or roughly $5.8 million worth. The actual number of shares the public could purchase was about five billion, or $650,000 worth at today’s prices. In order to make it appear that there were more shares in the public float than there were, Dylan had written a black-box program that churned the share float by a method called quote stuffing.
On average, over two billion shares of AQES.BB traded every day. Ninety-five percent of that was Dylan’s black box. Once the public came on board, the thirty-five billion shares in the offshore account would be used to control the stock price so that other Wall Street hedge funds could not manipulate it.
There was no doubt this would be the most heavily traded stock in the history of the world. In the name of their hedge fund, Dylan had purchased an office in the US which allowed them direct access as a market maker to the data transmission feeds for the main exchanges. It would have added several milliseconds to their speed if they could have purchased an office in New York, but all the bandwidth there was already taken at any price. So they settled for Chicago. Dylan considered this the only real weakness of their plan. With a several millisecond advantage over them, some of the big-name hedge funds and Wall Street firms could potentially harm their stock price using algos of their own.
When Dylan mentioned this to Darius, he replied that he did not think it would be a problem. At the time his response had seemed somewhat out of character, as their team had spent the last five years perfecting every detail of the plan. But maybe, since there was nothing they could do about it short of knocking New York into the ocean, Darius had decided not to worry about it. In any case, they would know in just a couple of weeks. Dylan could feel the pressure
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