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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

A stock with no voting power and no dividends is entirely worthless. You're basically just giving your money away to the company.

It's akin to buying shares in The Green Bay Packers, where fans can buy ceremonial shares of the Packers, with absolutely no value.

I don't understand why you would buy a share like this, besides relying on the Greater Fool theory to make money. It's essentially like buying a collectible like a baseball card and hoping that you can sell it to some other fool at a later time.

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Matt Levine wrote about this recently: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-11/insider-t...

Your listed two conditions leave stock buy backs and mergers as ways money could still be returned to share holders without voting rights.

Why does investing in collectibles make you a fool? Depending on the item, it may be just as likely to appreciate in value as a blue chip stock (with voting power and dividends).

I can imagine you arguing that a baseball card is just a worthless piece of cardboard but you could make the same argument about practically anything. What about stock in a sports collectibles company that sells millions of baseball cards, is that somehow better?

Are social networks better investments? What about fine foods, clothing or pretty much anything that makes up most of the economic worth of the world? If you live a strictly minimalistic life then there is nothing beyond the bare essentials that has any intrinsic value.

While that makes logical sense, the practical value of stock -- even stock that doesn't pay dividends -- for the average investor is rarely dependent on voting power. How many small investors actually leverage voting rights? The value is almost always predicated on the expectation that the company will do well and someone else will be willing to buy it off of you for more than you paid, despite having no intrinsic up side to the owner.

(TIL the Greater Fool theory -- and while it seems like a bad bet, there are LOTS of stocks on the market that work exactly that way.)

I don't know why people are voting your comment down. You're exactly right, in terms of any conventional stock analysis: if there's no dividend and no control, you're not getting a share of the business in any real sense.

Shares like this have value only in the bitcoin sense: they're valuable solely because people think they're valuable.

>Shares like this have value only in the bitcoin sense: they're valuable solely because people think they're valuable.

That's not true, you have ownership in the company proportional to the amount of stock you own. Just like any other stock. If the company is bought out or decides to give out dividends in the future you stand to make money. That is why the stock value tends to track the company's ups and downs. Comparing a stock to bitcoin is ludicrous.

And if the buy out is just of the voting rights stocks? There's no need to buy out non voting rights stocks if you want control. Give out dividends out of the goodness of their hearts?

Yes, if the company someday decides to issue dividends, you may then someday collect. That's true. But until then, you're gambling.

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