"Tad Borek" <borekfm[at]pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:qgSjc.2552$sU3.1744[at]newssvr27.news.prodigy.com...
- quote -

Thank you. I just found it fascinating to look at the numbers, see the
history of a given company, and how it grows and dies, or grows and grows.


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jm wrote:
- quote -

JM-
Two tips:

1. like many penny stocks, that company has filed for bankruptcy. Stocks
in bankrupt companies are almost always worth $0.000. Normally that "Q"
would be a tipoff - when there's a "Q" tacked onto a ticker as the fifth
letter, it means the company has filed for bankruptcy (see
http://www.sec.gov/answers/qadded.htm). Though in this case it seems the
ticker was MESQ right from the start. That's kind of like naming a race
horse "Elmer".

2. Please take some advice from a non-newbie: no serious investor wastes
their time with penny stocks, and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble
if you spend your time learning about real investing. John's description
of under $5 being a yellow alert and under $1 a red alert is a good rule
of thumb to work with. Most penny stocks are bought and sold by people
who don't know any better.

-Tad

In article <c67e4bdd.0404271921.795ad586[at]posting.google.com> , jm
<john_20_28_2000[at]yahoo.com> wrote:

- quote -

You can find out how many outstanding shares of stock exist by
looking them up at most major business web sites, or go look
up their SEC filings in the EDGAR system.

You don't need to buy all the shares to take over the business,
you just need 51% of the voting stock. Once you have that, you
can install yourself (or your cronies) as officers and CEO, and
then you are making the decisions for the company. You can
vote yourself a big cash payout if they have the cash, or sell
anything that they own and take the money.

The problem is that it is usually difficult or impossible to
get 51% of this kind of a company. The reason is that the
company might authorize 100-million shares. The founders
might have held back 80-million of these shares, and put
20-million out on the market. So even if you buy all 20-million
publically traded shares, you only have 20% of the votes.

In this example, to get 51% of the vote, you would have to
start buying out founders or investors. If they have a good
idea that they are working on, they likely will not sell, or
will want far more than the 3 cents per share that it is
trading at.

As far as actually stealing a company, this is what the famous
corporate raiders of the 80's were doing. They would find
companies where the stock price was far less than what the
value of the company was. They would go in, buy up 51% of the
stock, then take the company private. Once they were in full
control, they would sell all the valuable assets, sell off
divisions, outsource everything they could, and leave the
company as a shell of itself. Next, they would put the
company deeply in debt and take the profits from the loans.
Finally, the would sell the operating equipment of the company
to leasing companies, and do an expensive lease-back, and
take commissions from the deal. Once they extracted everything
they could out of a company, they would let it do an IPO again,
and make yet more money from the IPO. The now stripped company
would often end up going down the drain due to the debt burden.

A good example of this is Northwest Airlines. They once owned
all of their real estate and aircraft. Al Checkie and Gary
Davis looted the company for hundreds of millions of dollars,
and left NWA fighting for its life. Ponderosa Steakhouse is
another company that was raided, and it really has never
recovered from the looting.

-john-

--
================================================== ==================
John A. Weeks III 952-432-2708 john[at]johnweeks.com
Newave Communications http://www.johnweeks.com
================================================== ==================

john_20_28_2000[at]yahoo.com (jm) writes:

- quote -

Take a look at this page:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MESQ.PK

You'll see "Shares outstanding", "Float", "% held by insiders".
and other interesting numbers.

You'll also see that it's losing money like crazy, sitting on
over 7 million dollars in debt and has a _negative_ book value
per share.

Of course, Amazon has a negative book value, too.

- quote -

That 0.03/share price only means that nobody seems to want
to buy the stock.

You need to look at other things to get a better idea of how
healthy the business is. Balance sheets, income sheets, SEC
filings, that sort of thing. Accounting. It's not nearly
as exciting as looking at stock price charts, but stock price
charts tell you nothing about the health of a business - only
about what folks have been willing to pay for a share of it.



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[john_20_28_2000[at]yahoo.com (jm)] wrote:
[ 14 lines in misc.invest.financial-plan ]
===================

- quote -

The value of a company is measured by the value of each stock, times the
amount of total stock issued. In this case, we don't have to know the
amount of stock issued, because the total "market cap" is already shown by
the URL. According to it, "Amarillo" has a market cap of $247,23k.

If you would buy all shares, you would own the company. Usually, in order
to get hold of all shares, you'll have to a make a bid slightly larger than
the current market price, since not everyone would be happy to sell at the
current price. The bid premium varies, but is often in the ballpark of
around 20-30% above the current price. In order to own all of "Amarillo",
you would then likely have to offer around $300k to get all shares (or, at
least, 90% of them).

- quote -

The .03 cents only means the share value has probably dropped a lot. The
reasons for this can vary, but if you look at the income statement, you
will see the following for the year 2001 (figures are rounded):

Total revenue: $18,700k
Cost of revenue: $17,100k
Gross profit: $1,600k

Other operating expenses:
Selling, general, admin: $1,000k
Non-recurring: $1,700k
Others: $900k

Operating income: -$2,100k
Total other income/expenses: -$300k
Interest expense: -$500k
Net income: -$2,900k

In short, this is a corporation that went from a net income of 400k in 1999
and 600k in 2000 to a huge loss of $2,900k in 2001. Losses continued during
2002, and worse, the company has negative equity. The value of the loans
are larger than the value of the companys assets. This pretty much means
the company is fit for bankrupcy.

If you would buy this company for $300k, you would be left with a
restaurant business, having over nine million dollars in loans (of which
much is/was short-term debt), and almost no cash left (the latest data
shows that the company continued running up losses during 2002, and had
$180k in the bank after Q2 2002). This is quite typical for many "penny
stocks". I would not be surprised if this company has already filed chapter
11 or gone bankrupt.

--
Joakim Persson
M.S. student, CS/CE [at] LTH, Lund, Sweden
Libertarian -- Heavy Metal fanatic
zaladin[at]home.se -- http://www.efd.lth.se/~d00jp

I am newbie, as you can guess, but anyway, look at this company:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MESQ.PK&d=t

The stock is .03 cents a share. How do you tell how many shares there
are to possibly own of a business. Also, what is someone buys them
all? Does that mean that all of a sudden they own the business?

I chose this stock at random. I have no desire to own a restaurant;
okay, a little, but not this one.

Also, does that .03 cents mean they are bankrupt or about to be?
Thanks.