I think if the company winds up you just lose the money. I also had one company that did a buy-back of small parcels of shares which you had to opt out of if you wanted to keep the shares. Another was bought out by an overseas company - which was actually nice, I made a 50% profit in just over 12 months. I wish I'd bought more than $200 worth of that one!

I've been learning a lot about how the market works, but I definitely prefer funds than individual stocks. But buying a few stocks for $200 has taught me a lot about how everything works. I lost a lot of the value almost straight away, but I have gained most of the losses back over the last couple of years - if things continue as they are I look like I might actually start to make a profit longer term, so things are not as bad as they looked initially.