If you bought more than 51% of the common stock on the market, does that mean you have the owner/voting rights

Question

This may happen on stock with naked shares. Sometimes, it went down so low that you can throw in a few thousands and buy the company too! can i?

Answer 1

Besides the other excellent answers you received, there is the problem of accumulating 51% of the stock. As you accumulate more and more the price will increase. In fact if much of the stock is closely held, you may not be able to buy the stock at any reasonable price. But there is the possibility that you could create a short squeeze where you actually buy more than the amount of stock outstanding because of short sales. That is a stock buyers dream. To grab the shorts by the short hairs.

Answer 2

There are sometime classes of stocks. I once bought some stocks in a company that did VOIP (voice over internet protocol) work for small and medium companies. It was the big rage at the moment and I thought I was going to get my piece of the pie. Unrealized by me (who did not do "due diligence"), the real ownership of the business, who had nested shells and they would talk of the company by the general name, not the specific name of various shells, was in a super class of stocks. Well, the owners of the super class sold the business to another company at a great profit, which they advertised. So was I rich? Hardly, the shell that I owned stock in had but a name, the super stockholders gutted it, and that name was sold to a tin mine in Nevada, after a big reverse stock split. So then my several tens of thousands of shares were now only 8 shares. Today, the tin mine must have done well recently, because my shares went from worth $0.00008 (yeah, I have to count zeros) to a whole $0.064.

Then a company that had some really super-duper alternative to produce supposedly really sharp and clear MRI slice images. I was a dope who bought into it. Ah, better than GE's product, surely GE would buy us out and I would be doing really well, right? Wrong. Again, there was a super class of shares, and the real value (some $20 million) was held by some university researcher. Value dwindled and dwindled and when I finally gave up, I sold a couple hundred thousand shares, which I bought for pennies a share, for some miniscule fractions of a penny. It was less than a hundred dollars as I recall.

So if you were buying these two companies, you could indeed have gotten the bulk of the company for a song, but you would be left holding a very empty bag when you were done. Be careful when your big-itis gets your greed stirred up on the cheap, you could be left a chump.

Answer 3

you have voting rights with just 1 share. but as jerrold said, be certain of the type of stock it is. Not sure what you mean by "naked shares" as that is a term used for short selling & options trading. But if you are talking about enough shares to be on the board or something like that, many times, the insiders have 51% of shares already to avoid all that. But it would make you a big player in the company.

Answer 4

Yes you would have voter rights. Be careful though. OTC stocks are full of fraud. You might be buying stocks from a company that no longer exists and there are a lot of counterfeit shares floating around. One guy filed a SEC complaint claiming he owned 100% of the shares of a OTC company (stock certificates stuck in a dresser drawer) yet he still saw the shares being traded. In those cases, two or more people might own 51% of the shares outstanding which would be a court nightmare when it comes to voting.

Answer 5

You have voting rights with any percentage of a company's shares, unless the stock you purchase is termed "non-voting." Also, there may be more than one class of stock, so that the present owner may retain control even if you buy 51% or more of a "lesser" class of stock. The short answer to your question is: "It depends."

Answer 6

Some times companies have non voting shares as well. If you have 51% of the voting shares you normally have control.

Answer 7

it means you own the majority of that company
and yes you would have voting rights but you do not need the majority of the company to have voting rights also
what ever you vote for will come out ahead regaurdles of others voting