Why do so many people trade a bankrupt company's stock?
It may have some value!  Investopedia has a well-written quick article on how stock holders may still get some portion of the liquidated assets.  While there is generally little left for common shareholders if the price of those shares is tiny and some money does come back to shareholders there can still be significant profit to be made. As to why the trading volume is so high... there are many firms and hedge funds that specialize in calculating the value of and buying distressed debt and stock.  They often compete with each other to by the stock/debt that common shareholders are trying to get rid of.  In this particular case, there is a lot of popular interest, intellectual property at stake and pending lawsuits that probably boosts volume.
I don't see balance sheet in what you're looking at, and I'd definitely suggest learning how to read a balance sheet and looking at it, if you're going to buy stock in a company, unless you know that the recommendations you're buying on are already doing that and you're willing to take that risk.  Also, reading past balance sheets and statements can give you an idea about how accurate the company is with their predictions, or if they have a history of financial integrity. Now, if you're going the model portfolio route, which has become popular, the assumption that many of these stock buyers are making is that someone else is doing that for them.  I am not saying that this assumption is valid, just one that I've seen; you will definitely find a lot of skeptics, and rightly so, about model portfolios.  Likewise, people who trade based on what [Person X] does (like Warren Buffett or David Einhorn) are assuming that they're doing the research.  The downside to this is if you follow someone like this.  Yeah, oops. I should also point out that technical analysis, especially high probability TA, generally only looks at history.  Most would define it as high risk and there are many underlying assumptions with reading the price movements by high probability TA types. "I feel that OP's question is fundamentally wrong and an understanding of why is important. The stock market, as a whole, in the USA has an average annualized return of 11%. That means that a monkey, throwing darts at a board, can usually turn 100K into over three million in thirty-five years. (The analog I'm drawing is a 30-year old with 100K randomly picking stocks will be a multi-millionaire at 65). So to be ""good"" at investing in the stock market, you need to be better than a monkey. Most people aren't. Why? What mistakes do people make and how do you avoid them? A very common mistake is to buy high, sell low. This happened before and after the 08's recession. People rushed into the market beforehand as it was reaching its peak, sold when the market bottomed out then ignored the market in years it was getting 20+% returns. A Bogle approach for this is to simply consistently put a  part of your income into the market whether it is raining or shining. Paying high fees. Going back to the monkey example, if the monkey charges you a 2% management fees, which is low by Canadian standards, the monkey will cost you one million dollars over the course of the thirty-five years. If the monkey does a pretty good job it is a worthy expenditure. But most humans, including professional stock pickers, are worst than a monkey at picking stocks. Another mistake is adjusting your plan. Many people, when the market was giving bull returns before the 08's crash happily had a large segment of their wealth in stocks. They thought they were risk tolerant. Crash happened, they moved towards bonds. Then bonds returns were comically low while stocks soared. Had they had a plan, almost any consistent plan, they'd have done better. Another genre of issues is just doing stupid things. Don't buy that penny stock. Don't trade like crazy. Don't pay 5$ commission on a 200$ stock order. Don't fail to file your taxes.  Another mistake, and this burdens a lot of people, is that your long-term investments are for long-term investing. What a novel idea. You're 401K doesn't exist for you to get a loan for a home. Many people do liquidate their long-term savings. Don't. Especially since people who do make these loans or say ""I'll pay myself back later"" don't." "Note that we do not comment on specific stocks here, and have no place doing so. If your question is only about that specific stock then it is off topic. I have not tried to answer that part below. The key to valuation is predicting the net present value of all of a company's cash flows; i.e. of their future profits and losses. Through a number of methods to long to explain here investment banks and hedge funds work out what they expect the company's cash flows to be and trade so that these future profits, losses etc. are priced into the stock price. Since future cash flows, profits or whatever you want to call them are priced in, the price of a stock shouldn't move at all on an earnings statement. This begs the question ""why do some stock prices move violently when they announce earnings?"" The models that the institutional investors use are not perfect and cannot take into account everything. An unexpected craze for a product or a supply chain agreement breaking down on not being as good as it seems will not be factored into this pricing and so the price will move based on the degree to which expectation is missed or exceeded. Since penny socks are speculative their value is based far more on the long term expected cash flows and less on the short run cash flows. This goes a long way to explaining why some of the highest market capitalisation penny stocks are those making consistent losses. This means that they can be far less susceptible to price movements after an earnings announcement even if it is well out of the consensus range. Higher (potential) future value comes with the higher risks of penny stocks which discounts current value. In the end if people's expectation of the company's performance reflects reality then the profitability is priced in and there will be no price movement. If the actuality is outside of the expected range then there will be a price movement." "Yes, many hedge funds (for example) did not survive 2008-2009.  But hedge funds were failing both before and after that period, and other hedge funds thrived.  Those types of funds are particularly risky because they depend so much on leverage (i.e. on money that isn't actually theirs). More publically-visible funds (like those of the big-name index fund companies) tended not to close because they are not leveraged.  You say that ""a great many companies"" failed during the recession, but that's not actually true.  I can't think of more than a handful of publically-traded companies that went bankrupt.  So, since the vast majority of publically-traded companies stayed in business, their stocks kept some/most of their value, and the funds that owned those stocks stayed afloat. I personally did not see a single index fund that went out of business due to the recession." "You can see all the (millions) of trades per day for a US stock only if you purchase that data from the individual exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, ARCA, ...), from a commercial market data aggregator (Bloomberg, Axioma, ...), or from the Consolidated Tape Association.  In none of that data will you ever find identifying information for the traders. What you are recalling regarding the names of ""people from the company"" trading company stock is related to SEC regulations stating that people with significant ownership of company stock and/or controlling positions on the company board of directors must publicize (most of) their trades in that stock.  That information can usually be found on the company's investor relations website, or through the SEC website." "Discussing individual stocks is discouraged here, so I'll make my answer somewhat generic. Keep in mind, some companies go public in a way that takes the shares that are held by the investment VCs (venture capitalists) and cashes them out of their positions, i.e. most if not all shares are made public. In that case, the day after IPO, the original investors have their money, and, short of the risk of being sued for fraud, could not care less what the stock does.  Other companies float a small portion up front, and retain the rest. This is a way of creating a market and valuing the company, but not floating so many shares the market has trouble absorbing it. This stock has a ""Shares Outstanding"" of 2.74B but has only floated 757.21M. The nearly 2 billion shares held by the original investors certainly impact their wallets with how this IPO went.  See the key statistics for the details." "Oh please. Most of the unsecured creditors who get screwed in bankruptcy are large banks. They know the risk going in which is why unsecured lends at a high interest rate. Yes, trade creditors often do get screwed but it's a cost of doing business -- it's why a vendor needs to monitor its receivables and watch for signs of insolvency and adjust the terms of trade accordingly.  You should have made sure you were covered by brokerage insurance before handing money to a company like that. The ""I'm the little guy"" argument is just weak." You can look at the company separately from the ownership. The company needs money that it doesn't have, therefore it needs to borrow money from somewhere or go bankrupt.  And if they can't get money from their bank, then they can of course ask people related to the company, like the two shareholders, for a loan. It's a loan, like every other loan, that needs to be repaid. How big the loan is doesn't depend on the ownership, but on how much money each one is willing and capable of giving. The loan doesn't give them any rights in the company, except the right to get their money back with interest in the future.  Alternatively, such a company might have 200 shares, and might have given 75 to one owner and 25 to the other owner, keeping 100 shares back. In that case, the shareholders can decide to sell some of these 100 shares. I might buy 10 shares for $1,000 each, so the company has now $10,000 cash, and I have some ownership of the company (about 9.09%, and the 75% and 25% shares have gone down, because now they own 75 out of 110 or 25 out of 110 shares). I won't get the $10,000 back, ever; it's not a loan but the purchase of part of the company.