Hacker News Reader

> As an (unhappy) investor

I don't think I'm the only one here that would love to hear that story!

Not much of a story to tell, I bought ZNGA shares, and am unhappily suffering LOL.

I figured they are getting close to book value, and they couldn't drop much further (always the worst reason to buy a stock). And I thought that given they have real revenues, that someone might be willing to step in and buy them for their customers. Maybe YHOO or AOL, or even FB. Now, with their revenues dropping, it could be that NO ONE wants to buy them for fear of overpaying (like they did with OMGPOP), so I could be up the creek on this one.

Investors can't rely on seeing their share of the current book value if a company fails. That would be a good lower bound on companies' market cap if they generally wound down and sold their assets in an orderly way, but few companies do that. Most continue operating until they literally can't and then the bankruptcy receiver has to dump all their assets in a fire sale. Sorry.

Ah of course, post IPO. For some reason I assumed it would be earlier than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com