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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

    Trade on shares in the
    company was suspended

What does this mean? Is a certain stock exchange not executing trades anymore? Are all exchanges worldwide in sync not executing trades? If so, how is the sync achieved?

If it only was suspended at the Frankfurt stock exchange which is mentioned in the article, it would be interesting to see how it is doing at other exchanges.

Google is still showing realtime Frankfurt prices. Currently at a market cap of about €350M.

And what is the reason behind that? Is it guaranteed that shares of a company that files for insolvency are worth 0? And therefore the exchanges want to save uninformed investors from buying them?

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> What does this mean?

That you can not trade the stock for now. Trading has been resumed. On many stock exchanges there are rules for this. Something very common.

> And what is the reason behind that? Is it guaranteed that shares of a company that files for insolvency are worth 0?

No. The company could recover, could get bought etc. As a stock holder you are the last in line. Should the company get liquidated, bond holders will have a higher priority for any money recovered.

> And therefore the exchanges want to save uninformed investors from buying them?

No. Please look up Hertz, the car rental company and what is happen recently the stock. They are bankrupt, people are buying the stock and Hertz was even allowed to issue more shares.

Planet Money’s podcast this morning covered just this topic RE: Hertz.

>They are bankrupt, people are buying the stock and Hertz was even allowed to issue more shares.

Eh, sort of. The bankruptcy judge said they could, but the SEC said they had some "questions" about the offering's prospectus and Hertz basically withdrew the offer after that. It's not clear whether the company actually sold any shares.

> Google is still showing realtime Frankfurt prices. Currently at a market cap of about €350M.

Trading had resumed by then. It was supended temporarily (for one hour) just before the announcement.

All other major german exchanges are up and running and allow trading of Wirecard stock... you can see the latest realtime trades from Tradegate (Berlin) here https://www.tradegate.de/orderbuch_umsaetze.php?isin=DE00074...

What other exchanges are they listed on? It is pretty uncommon for a company to ever list on more than one exchange.

Depends. Very common for non-US Shares (Germany, China, UK etc.)

Maybe we just disagree about what "common" and "uncommon" mean in this context.

What actual percentage of the 100,000+ public companies around the world trade on another exchange?

Most of the DAX 30 in Germany don't even trade on another exchange. Adidas doesn't. BMW doesn't. Siemens doesn't (they were delisted by the NYSE in 2014.) Does any of the DAX 30 trade on an exchange outside of Germany?

As far as I can tell, only 8 companies in Germany trade on another exchange but maybe my source is wrong.

Shell is dual listed and plenty of foreign companies have ADR's on the US exchanges

Almost no ADRs trade on US exchanges. There are over 100,000 public companies in the world and the NYSE has only 506 non-US issuers. I'd call that pretty uncommon.

I said it was pretty uncommon, not that people couldn't name individual, rare examples.

> What does this mean?

Since the company has filed for insolvency the shares can no longer be traded.

> Is it guaranteed that shares of a company that files for insolvency are worth 0?

When a company files for insolvency it means the companies total liabilities are greater than the total assets.

And when this happens the company is handed over to a liquidator and they then decide how to handle the companies future.

What the liquidator normally does is try to sell the company or parts of the company to other third parties.

With the proceeds of that sale they then pay back the debt.

Then if any money is left over they split that money between the shareholders.

But naturally since the debts are greater than the assets the shareholders will get very little of their original investment back.

Since the shareholders are last in the line for the money they tend to lose the most.

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