What happened

After gaining an impressive 11% on Wednesday, shares of Brazilian telecom Oi S.A. (NYSE: OIBR.C) jumped an even more impressive 16.4% in Thursday trading, and are heading into Friday with strong momentum.

The big question is: Why?

Question mark in a speech bubble

Image source: Getty Images.

So what

It's not as if there's any good news about Oi floating around out there. Mostly, the news out of Brazil these days is about wildfires.

That's got nothing to do with Oi, unless you want to get imaginative and figure that as long as Brazil's government is busy fighting real fires, it may not have much time left over to try to nationalize Oi (as it's been rumored to be planning).

Now what

Other than that, I really don't see much reason for Oi stock to be going up right now. And for that matter, I'm not sure the fact that it is going up is particularly significant. The stock opened this week with a 12% drop from Friday's close on no news. Even if it holds on to the gains from the past two days, it'll still close the week no higher than its share price of 10 days ago.

When you get right down to it, when you're talking about a penny stock like Oi, it doesn't take a lot to create a big percentage gain (or loss) on any given day. Today's move, while big in percentage terms, is to me a nonevent.