The creditors are going to pick over the assets of this company and I would not risk a nickel on buying the stock, no matter how depressed the price might be.
Something to consider is how this whole thing happened (and I have not read all that much about it) but I think that this was predicated by a lack of liquidity as much as it was by straight financial losses and if so, there might be underlying assets available in the future to creditors and ultimately stockholders but I don’t think this is worth the risk of even $500.
I read something interesting in a blog last night; apparently Lehman paid out $5.7 BILLION in bonuses last night which might be subject to recovery by the creditors under certain conditions in the Bankruptcy law. Here is the link
http://www.creditslips.org/
it is the second item on the page as I write this (11 pm Monday night).
Bankruptcy law can be very different from general commercial law and there are some surprising things that can come out of it. A few years ago we extended credit to a weak customer and finally got paid about $18000 that they owed us. We then shipped another $10000 to them and about six weeks later they filed a chapter 11 petition and we lost the $10,000.
A year later we get a letter from the bankruptcy trustee demanding return of the $18000 cause it was a “preference”. I won’t go into more here but we settled for a nominal amount after hiring an attorney but I had never heard of this and I have been an accountant for over 30 years and my wife was a credit analyst for over 10 years before we were married.
SRM