Treasure Stock Rockets Up 80% on New Find

Investors are dancing in the Streets in Tampa, Florida, and it is not even the Gasparilla Festival yet. Treasure salvers occupy a beloved place in Florida lore, and the work of high tech salver Gregg Stem has hit stratospheric heights with today's announcement. In what is believed to be the largest collection of coins ever excavated from a shipwreck, Odyssey Marine Exploration (Amex symbol OMR) has recovered over 500,000 silver coins weighing more than 17 tons, hundreds of gold coins, worked gold, and other artifacts from the wreck of a Colonial period shipwreck code-named "Black Swan", located in an undisclosed location in near the coast of England.

Mr. Stem first began to make his mark in the 1990s with a company called Seahawk Deep Ocean Technology. Using a pioneering robotic undersea rover, Merlin, Seahawk recovered booty from a Spanish Galleon. You may have heard about the first great find of the 21st century - the SS Republic, and many thousands of Gold coins of Civil War vintage recovered off the coast of South Carolina. Under the leadership of Greg Stemm, other finds are in the works by Odyssey, so this find is not a lone flash in the pan. This is the continuing fruit of a lifetime of exploring with new undersea technology.

It is hard to contain the excitement of such a large discovery rescued from Davy Jones clutches. Odyssey is a publicly traded stock, and the breaking news pushed the stock up from $4.60 to $8.32, with an eight hundred per cent increase in trading volume. Trading after the closing bell on Friday at 4pm, added another 53 cents. When the volume of trading, and the price spikes in such a dramatic fashion after such news, trading history shows additional gains will often be posted. While such gains are rare for a publicly traded stock, they may only represent the tip of the iceberg in ultimate gains. The market value of the stock (after today's big run-up) is 360 million dollars. Prior to today's announcement, the richest recovery from the seas was accomplished by Mel Fisher, when he recovered the Atocha. That Spanish galleon eventually yielded over one billion dollars in treasure, and untold worth in living history. Odyssey has many wrecks in the recovery process to add to the bottom line.

If today's announcement proves correct, the value of this find may well eclipse the Atocha. The amount of treasure on the bottom of the seas still boggles the imagination. For example, for two hundred years, the Spanish Main sailed two treasure fleets each year, from the New World to Spain. These ships carried the fantastic riches of the Incas, and the Aztecs. Each flotilla contained twenty to sixty ships. Over five per cent of this trade was lost to storms. Even considering what has been recovered in recent years, less than five per cent of this treasure has been salvaged. So just from the Spanish treasure fleet losses alone, billions of dollars lie on the sea floor, silently waiting for men like Greg Stemm.