Gmail in a Financial Management class!

My Finance professor was explaining the concept of a "rights issue" the other day to us. Rights issue is when a company wants to raise more money from shares and offers the first "rights" to buy such shares to exisiting share holders (the price offered is discounted a bit). He further explanined that normally an existing shareholder recieves a letter from company offering him, for example, 100 shares for each of 100 shares he already holds. He can either accept the offer in full or in part or not accept it. Say, a shareholder chooses to accept only half the offer (he accepts to buy just 50 out of 100 shares on offer), then he can redeem the rights of the remaining 50 shares that he has by selling those rights to someone else. Now someone in the class asked, "Sir, can't this person give those rights for free?". The smart and up-to-date professor replied " well yes he can, but then if he is enterprising he won't. Just like if you have 10 Gmail invitations, you can either give them away free, or if you are enterprising like me, then you may sell them!".

I found it quite an interesting analogy :-)