> Look at what was Yahoo for an example -- for a while the stock was worth less than just the value of their Alibaba shares, meaning the stock market attributed

> Look at what was Yahoo for an example -- for a while the stock was worth less than just the value of their Alibaba shares, meaning the stock market attributed a negative value to what was left of Yahoo. That is not what the situation meant. Yahoo was trading at less than their book value per share. The vast majority of their book value was the share of Alibaba the company owned. This asset was not generating revenue for Yahoo, nor was it a liquid investment that Yahoo could convert into cash whenever it wanted to. There may have also been other conditions on sale of the stake that meant, in at last some circumstances, the liquidation value of the stake was significantly less than the paper value on the books. Therefore, it gets discounted by the market. Since it comprised such a large portion of Yahoo's book value, the size of the discount was greater than the value of Yahoo's operations, leading to a price/book ratio less than 1. Yahoo's other operations still had positive value.