By Brian J. O'Connor
Detroit News Finance Editor

Only two kinds of animals supposedly live on Wall Street - bulls and bears - but I've discovered a third: turkeys.

Not just any old turkeys, but the kind of inbred, brain-addled barnyard birds raised purely for slaughter. The ones so dumb that when it rains, they stare, mouths agape, up at the clouds until they drown.

Only someone with giblets for brains could be behind the trading last week in shares of old General Motors Corp. stock. That's right: Shares in the decaying detritus of the bankrupt automaker's old incarnation still trade on the pink sheets and will until the ghost of old GM is officially vaporized in court. Then those shares will vanish, and when they do, they'll be completely worthless.

The trustees operating Motors Liquidation Corp. - the bankrupt shell of old GM - say so, and so does the exchange where the shares are listed. Just checking on the ticker symbol MTLQQ brings up a big red headline: "WARNING: This company is in bankruptcy!"

But amazingly, those shares shot up 28 percent on Wednesday, when an astonishing 26.7 million shares were gobbled up.

And I do mean gobbled.

Leavings appetizing to some

The only explanation is that someone, somewhere, thinks those moldering old shares will somehow be part of the new post-bankruptcy GM. So, when GM announced it had paid back $5.4 billion in U.S. government loans early, along with other financial good news, shares of old GM shot up from Tuesday's close of 54 cents to end Wednesday at 69 cents.

By comparison, shares of profitable, still-in-business Ford Motor Co. traded at about six times the volume of Motors Liquidation on Wednesday - but gained a mere 1.6 percent. Still, Motors Liquidation that day outsold local stalwarts Johnson Controls Inc., Valassis Communications Inc., Masco Corp. and Compuware Corp., and moved 29 times more shares than Domino's Pizza.

Evidently, what people can't lose on the price of old GM, they're making up in volume.

"We're just as shocked as anybody," says Chelsey Loshak, director of marketing for Pink-OTC.com, the exchange where Motors Liquidation shares trade.

Loshak allows that some of the activity may come from day traders looking to make money on the momentary ups and downs of the stock, regardless of its value, or from short-sellers who borrowed shares of old GM, betting it would go down, and who seek to replace those shares now that the stock is cheap.

"And then," she says, "you have those investors who just don't get it. They just hope that some day those shares will still be worth something."

Even the folks running the rummage sale of the assets GM left behind in bankruptcy say there's simply no way those old shares will be worth anything.

Standing in line for nothing

"We continue to believe that there will be no value for common stockholders," said a Motors Liquidation spokesman, "even under the most optimistic of scenarios." As for people thinking their shares of old GM will be magically exchanged for shares of the new GM, the spokesman added that "none of the publicly owned stocks or bonds issued by the former General Motors Corp. are or will become securities in the new GM."

By the time the old plants, machinery and other assets left behind when GM exited bankruptcy are sold off, there won't be nearly enough money generated to pay off bondholders, who are first in line to get whatever can be gotten. Shareholders will get nothing, because there's simply nothing there. And the shares offered by new GM will go first to the U.S. and Canadian governments, which own the bulk of equity for bailing GM out, and next to the health care trust fund for retired union autoworkers.

In the meantime, liquidating the moldering leftovers of old GM will take years. During that time, day traders can make a few bucks with their computer games. But for anyone else, the best bet is just to sell and take a tax loss.

Even a one-time optimist has learned his lesson. Joel Rudy of Buzzards Bay, Mass., picked up 1,000 shares of GM in 2009, convinced the government wouldn't let GM go bankrupt.

"I guessed wrong," he says.

Rudy bought at $8 a share and sold at 66 cents. But even he is baffled by the activity in the stock. "Unless they're day-traders hoping it'll move a penny in a day," Rudy says, "it really doesn't make any sense at all."

So remember: When it comes to Wall Street, you can make money if you're a bear, and you can make money if you're a bull. But if you insist on being a turkey, you're gonna get plucked.

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Hey, turkeys! Trot away from old GM shares