SWP's back said:
How are they effectively worthless?
Voting rights mean diddly squat 99% of the time and there are plenty of growth funds you can choose where the stock you invest in pay no dividends.
Because in 99.999999...in basically all of stock market trading, shares are bought for profit. I mean, that's the sole reason the stock market exists, really. Traders will buy up stocks bargaining on some specific or non-specific market event causing the trading price of the company to rise, whereupon they will instantly sell up for a profit. Who cares if their bulk selling causes the price to suddenly collapse again, because it's all about milking those small increases. However, just about every professional and non-professional examination of the scum's financial future has predicted nothing to cause their shares to up in price and everything to justify the idea that those shares will plummet in valuation. There are words for those people who will take gambles on stuff like this in football and the market. In football, those people are called "loyal" and "fans". In economics, those people are called "stupid" and "bankrupt". The stock market isn't like football - unless the scum are getting close to winning a trophy, them merely winning a game isn't going to make their market valuation rise - in fact, there's little their on-pitch staff can do to support their IPO valuation whatsoever, and that was about the one thing that could save them.
In other words, as soon as the serious brokers get involved, and as soon as the scum start releasing their year-end accounts (and I believe there were reports that they'd already withheld one set of accounts because it was sufficiently negative they thought it could put the stock offering at risk, so...have fun with that when those accounts come out, rags!) then anyone with money is going to avoid them like the plague because there's no chance of making money on it. The only real way they are likely to push shares is hoping for rich fans to buy them as trophies, and the great thing about that if it happens is that trophy shares don't tend to get sold very often, and that means less and less chance for their value to rise...
