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I owned shares in a company that was suddenly acquired and all shareholders cashed out with a nice profit. This company didn't fail, it just succeeded and disap

• danbruc 5y ago
  This scenario makes perfect sense to me, it's essentially the company buying back all the shares, I don't think it is really significant that another company bought them up instead. You issue shares to raise capital, you invest the capital, you buy back the shares distributing the gains or losses. But what if you never buy back the shares?
  • jseban 5y ago
    I agree that it's not significant, it can also just transfer to being privately owned. Companies go in and out of the stock exchange all the time. The point of an IPO really is that you have some kind of growth or development phase that needs funding, so it's always a kind of "negative balance" and selling a promise for the future. If a company was rock solid with constant profits and no use for additional funding, it would probably be traded below it's cash assets, because there's no use of owning such a stock. The main point is that invested money is actually used to do things, even if you lose you have contributed to progress and development in some way, it's not like a casino where money just moves around.