27 August 2010

Oh, now that we see the potential, we'll take that from you

I am a little ticked off. I had a stock taken forcefully from me and I a offended that such a thing is legal.

I am convinced that great stock opportunities come along at best a few times a year. On occasion, you encounter a company that Wall Street doesn't really know about and that has not yet generated any numbers to prove its potential.

Oh, and I really like fish tacos. It's a San Diego thing but you know, there was a time when pizza was just an Italian thing. If something tastes good, it'll take off.

Rubio's is a local restaurant chain that helped to popularize the fish taco this side of the border and on top of that, they offer relatively healthy Mexican food.

For all these reasons, I bought stock in the company. McDonald's market cap is about $78 billion. When I bought Rubio's stock, their market cap was about $50 million. If Rubio's had 1% of the value of McDonald's, the stock would rise 10X. It seemed to me a reasonable bet.

About two days ago, my Yahoo portfolio says, "No such symbol RUBO." I didn't have time to look into it until today. As it turns out, a company has taken Rubio's private. The good news is that they paid me about 75% more than I had paid. The bad news is that this is nowhere close to the 10X I thought possible. And, I was not even given the option to say no to their offer of $8.70 a share. This was, from my perspective, a forced sale.

So, on top of all the other problems with stock market investing, whenever a really good opportunity does come along, someone can force it from you? Really? That just seems wrong. And I'm a little ticked off. I might just go somewhere different for Mexican food this weekend.

2 comments:

nunya said...

Whoa. That's not something I learned in business classes. I didn't know they could do that.

I'm sorry they did that to you.

Anonymous said...

I had a feeling the game was rigged.