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There's a small cottage industry of purchasers who will buy heavily depressed for chump change. It can be strategic to help offset other gains in a tax year.

The purchaser collects a service fee and a lottery ticket for the random "XYZ Inc sold patent to IBM for $10 million during company liquidation."

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Can you explain more please? I dont understand. If I buy a thing that was once worth 100 million dollars for 10 million dollars, I havent lost anything yet because it would need to go down even further from 10, right?

The seller's main utility in selling is to realize the losses for tax purposes.

The buyer isn't buying for tax offsets. They're buying at deep discounts because they're often the only bidder and the hope that they occasionally find themselves taking on some asset for which the sellers have vastly underestimated the value (such as some obscure patent).

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