At least 25 companies that merged with special-purpose acquisition companies between 2020 and 2021 have issued so-called going-concern warnings in recent months, according to research firm Audit Analytics.
....The companies with warnings amount to more than 10% of the 232 companies that listed through SPACs in that period....That percentage is roughly double that for companies that listed through more-traditional initial public offerings, Audit Analytics said.
....The relatively large number of dire warnings is the latest example of the rough state of the SPAC sector,
Becoming a public company is a pain in the ass. It requires a ton of prep; a detailed prospectus; a willingness to share detailed financials; a road show to drum up interest; and much, much more. It's hardly a surprise that SPACs—which require a lot less work—are attractive, especially to companies that might not want to reveal just how solid and stable their prospects really are.
I might not care about any of this if SPACs were available only to sophisticated investors. But SPACs are by definition open to the ordinary public, and the ordinary public is easily talked into the glories of SPAC investment—just like they were talked into CDOs and synthetic CDOs and SPVs and CDSes and all the other wonderful Wall Street products that we learned about after they crashed in 2008.
Investing in startup companies is inherently risky, even at the IPO stage. For retail investors, there's no excuse for making it even riskier.
The average person shouldn't be investing in anything other than broad-based stock mutual funds with long track records run by huge, trustworthy companies. Listen to real investors like Warren Buffet who say the same thing. Actually, probably the #1 investment is in your self: eat quality food, drink less, don't smoke anything, exercise, take care of your mental health, live a mindful life. Investing in your self will make you happier than any amount of money.
Truer words are seldom spoken.
It’s too bad we don’t have entities dedicated to consumer protection and/or economic collapse prevention in this country. Maybe one day somebody will come up with apps for that?
Investing in startup companies is inherently risky, even at the IPO stage.
Yes. Just ask the suckers (many of them retirees I'm told) who invested in Donald Trump's public gaming company back in the 90s. Company went belly up within a few years, by which time, of course, Trump had long since received his own massive, front-loaded personal compensation.
Truth Social is different. Honest.
😊😊😊
It actually is in a couple of important ways. At the time, most people (myself included) thought it was almost impossible to lose money running a casino if the drop was large enough. At that time, nobody but insiders really knew how incompetent Trump was, just that his other businesses had failed. Nobody really predicted just how awful and incompetent Donald Trump was, to the point where he needed to be bailed out by his Dad and then ran them into the ground like a bust-out.
The second thing that’s different is that everyone who invested in Trump’s Twitter ripoff knows with absolute certainty that he’s a con man. It looks like the whole thing is just a scam to bleed off the investors money but it’s a lot like Trump’s parable about the snake—everyone knew what Trump is but game him their money anyway. It’s heartbreaking that some people will lose their life’s savings but they knew what Trump was before they foolishly gave him their money.
I never understood why Trump was so eager to tell the parable about the snake.
Was it because a *tiny* part of him felt he had to warn off people?
Or maybe it made the eventual betrayal even more sordid, to appeal to his sadistic nature?
Surely more the former rather than the later. But even in that context, it’s a bizarre thing for him to say.
Trump didn't lose money running casinos. They went bankrupt because of his financing structure. No business produces so much cash flow that there isn't some level of debt and interest rates that makes it impossible to turn a profit. That's what did in Trump's casinos. They made more than enough money to cover operating expenses. They just couldn't generate enough to cover the financing.
And Donald Trump wasn't incompetent running his casino business. He was extremely successful at accomplishing his goals. It's just that those goals didn't include running a long term successful business. His only goal was to pull as much money out of investors' pockets and into his own as possible. It worked brilliantly, as Trump, personally, made a huge amount of money.
At least in this instance, Trump wasn't incompetent. He was just a sociopath.
A successful casino is basically a license to print money. Part of building a successful is “the art of the deal”, so to speak. There are casinos the world over and as long as they draw enough players, they basically can’t lose money.
Others built casinos, even in Atlantic City and even with a lot of debt but made money until the action started to dry up. Even his running the casinos as a bust-out was a near run thing since he was evidently on the hook for a huge amount of money that was simply forgiven as a gift by the bankers.
But he did indeed steal a lot of money from the suckers who trusted him. And his fortune is based, in main, on what was probably the largest tax fraud in history.
And Donald Trump wasn't incompetent running his casino business. He was extremely successful at accomplishing his goals. It's just that those goals didn't include running a long term successful business. His only goal was to pull as much money out of investors' pockets and into his own as possible. It worked brilliantly, as Trump, personally, made a huge amount of money.
This.
His goal was to steal a quick 100 million from gullible rubes. Running a successful long term operation would require work and diligence. Taking the money and running was a much more appealing option for someone like Trump.
One thing I find puzzling about Truth Social: it's virtually *identical* from what I can see in all aspects to Twitter. Did the latter truly do absolutely nothing to protect its IP? TS is seemingly getting away with wholesale counterfeit.
It's just bizarre.
Sucker (aka, Republican) beware. Trump is always only about Trump.
Carter should have negatively campaigned in 1980 that Reagan was gay. I learned about it in 2005.
Democrats have never been against gay people as a Party, tho.
So why do you think it'd be a winner?
I presume that the rumor would put off Republicans. They wouldn't vote for Carter, they would just stay home.
Gay was bad. It would turn off key voting blocs.
Do you know how much Reagan won the election by?
Not that much. Just reversing Iran hostage and Anderson changes things greatly.
The question is, though, are they doing worse than companies who didn't SPAC?
The evidence of that, though, is much less clear. Many IPO companies are failing, and of course lots of startups fail.
Another great victory for conservatism,
Boris Johnson to reportedly bring back imperial measurements to mark platinum jubilee,
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/28/boris-johnson-set-to-bring-back-imperial-measurements-to-mark-platinum-jubilee
Next up, forget debtor's prison, we need to bring back the pillory! It's about our ancient freedoms that are under assault!