It's no secret that we all love a good stock story. But, sometimes, the tales we hear about how a company got to where it is seem… well, a little bit too good to be true. And that's exactly what happened when I stumbled upon this one little-known stock on an internet forum: AMTD Digital Inc.

When you're a fledgling business, it can be tough to get noticed. But when you're a financial services startup whose market cap is more than $450 billion and growing, it's hard not to stand out.

AMTD Digital is a financial services startup that trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol "HKD." The company is an arm of AMTD Idea Group (AMTD), an investment bank based in Hong Kong that is also listed in New York and Singapore. The unit was founded in 2019, and provides fintech services in Asia, including a virtual bank called Airstar.

AMTD Digital brought in just over $25 million in revenue last year, according to a regulatory filing. And yet this week its market cap is more than $450 billion—surpassing that of Shell (RDSA) and Costco (COST) and putting it closer to the size of Walmart (WMT) and Exxon (XOM). Even the company was scratching its head over the sudden surge. "To our knowledge, there are no material circumstances, events nor other matters relating to our company's business and operating activities since the IPO date," the company said in a statement Tuesday.

How did this little known company go up 32,000 percent to become the 10th most valuable company in the world!

HKD went public at $7.80 a share on July 19th, and hit a high $2,555.30. If you were to have put in $1,000 at the IPO price you would have 280 shares roughly multiply that by its current stock price of $1,679 you would be sitting on $214,912 as of August 3rd!

$HKD, the company that went public at a $1.4 billion market cap 10 days ago, is now worth $462 BILLION. $HKD had less than $25 million in revenue last year while Walmart brought in over $570 billion.

How Did This Happen to $HKD?

StockTwits as of 8/3/22 has over 12,533 mentions about $AMTD the parent company of $HKD and 10,965 mentions of $HKD (Statistics are provided by Invezo).

Apparently $HKD IPO underwriters allocated 16 million shares to brokers whose clients flipped the IPO and sold the shares. The brokers sold the shares but the underwriters never delivered them, which created short positions. The rumor is that this is why the stock has skyrocketed and caught the attention of so many on Reddit and StockTwits.

The problem is that since the brokers sold shares that were not delivered brokers are having to go on the open market buy back shares but the trick is finding a broker who is willing to sell. People Reddit are holding shares forcing brokers to pay incredibly high prices for a stock that should be worth no more than $10 by my estimates.