Talk:Watered stock

Dont understand tis at all

I admit I know little about finance, but it would be nice if articles were written with the accessibility of the average person in mind. As far as I can tell this is the only sentence that actually explains the process of how this is done in the article:

  "To do so, they would contribute property to a new corporation in return for stock at an inflated par value. On the balance sheet, the property would be the corporation's only capital, and because legal capital was fixed to aggregate par value, the value of the property would go up.[4] While the promoter had $10,000 in stock, the corporation might only have $5,000 worth of assets, but would still be worth $10,000 on paper."

What 'property' are they contributing? Is this a term for cash? Land? How does this end up being the corporations only property? And how does this result in stocks that are overvalued? Are we perhaps talking specifically about a freshly organized corporation? A promoter gives them their only $5,000 worth of property in exchange for stocks claiming to be worth $10,000? How does this work with corporations already wort tens or hundreds of millions? Basically this article explains what watered stocks ARE, but not how they they get that way. How they are different from regular stocks might make it easier to understand as well. Perhaps it is as simple as watered stocks are created by corporations selling, for example, total stocks worth $1,000,000 on paper, while only taking $500,000 in actual cash as payment: thus you end up with a corporation with $1M in issued stocks, while only holding half that in cash they were actually paid for said stocks (other factors not considered). I could understand an explanation like that perfectly well. THEN you bring in the promoters, and explain that they are the ones most likely to be given a deal including large amounts of stock sold at half or 3/4 price, as an incentive to business. The company won't sell thousands of $1 shares at $0.5 each to individuals on the street, because the whole purpose of selling stocks is to raise capital...BUT, it might be worth it if you can convince a promoter to buy a million shares, even if you only get $500K in cash for it. Call it stock wholesale. This only explains the crucial component of why a corporation would WANT to do this, something which I don't think is mentioned at all in the article as it stands. Of course, this is just my attempt to reason out everything that is NOT explained in the article, and I may be totally mistaken. Perhaps it would make great sense to sell shares at half price to individuals, as a way of attracting customers; I have never heard of it however. A little elaboration of the 'a person can be held liable for the other half of the stock value' part would be in order as well: this is not unreasonable. By buying a stock, you are buying a part ownership in a company. Therefore, they used to consider you liable for any debt that corporation might entail. And they had a point; if you are 1/1,000,000 owner or a company that claims to be worth $1M, you'd better have your dollar available. Now they have limited liability corporations instead; better for business. Otherwise people would be too afraid to buy stocks because if they invest in a dishonest company, they might be forced to pay for it. Not good for the economy.

64.223.165.28 (talk) 00:29, 29 March 2018 (UTC)