Want to not be a "penny stock" anymore? There's plenty of ways, but for Yield10 Bioscience (NASDAQ:YTEN) striking a deal with Monsanto (NYSE:MON) did the trick on Monday. That is if you subscribe to the blue-chip clique that considers any stock under $5 a penny stock, anyway.
Shares of YTEN had been fluctuating back and forth around the $5 benchmark since dipping under it for the first time in August 2016, slipping as low as $1.82 last week after surging as high as $9.30 in May.
The stock is one of the best on the Nasdaq exchange on Monday following news that the Worburn, Massachusetts-based company granted a non-exclusive license to seed giant Monsanto to evaluate its novel C3003 and C3004 yield traits in soybean. Monsanto wants to test the traits to see if they can improve yields in its soybean pipeline.
According to Yield10, its Smart Carbon Grid for Plants advanced metabolic engineering technology platform enhances carbon capture through gene targets. C3003, which is derived from algae, is the flagship plant trait and C3004 is hypothesized to play a role in carbon positioning.
Soybean is a top agricultural crop in the U.S., with more than 4.3 billion bushels harvested last year worth about $41 billion. With those numbers in mind, even a small improvement in yield gets amplified tremendously across the entire field.
After closing at $1.95 on Friday, shares of YTEN gapped up to $2.20 at Monday's opening bell and caught fire, climbing to an intra-day high at $8.67 before some wind came out of the sails. With about 90 minutes left in the trading day, shares are printing $5.76, representing a gain of 195.26% on the day.
