I’m fond of calling Mark Zuckerberg a lottery winner. The reason is he is a billionaire for no earthly reason. His company has value, but nothing close to what it is valued right now. The weirdness of the financial world at present is what has made it and him super-rich. That weirdness is easy to see in something like this.

Just when it seemed like investors might have lost some of their appetite for initial public offerings of companies that lose money . . . yeah, right.

Papa Murphy’s Holdings Inc. priced its IPO today at $11 a share. The stock closed up a nickel. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing IPOs by profitless technology companies. But this is a pizza chain that had net losses of $606,000 in 2011, $2.1 million in 2012 and $2.6 million in 2013.

Now it has a stock-market value of about $187 million, or about 2.3 times its revenue last year. Founded in 1981, Papa Murphy’s, based in Vancouver, Washington, sells uncooked pizzas that customers take home to bake. It had been majority-owned since 2010 by private-equity firm Lee Equity Partners LLC.

The argument is the suckers buying stock in a company that is losing money are just suckers. Those suckers, however, are caught up in a game created by sharps to fleece squares. A great book on the subject is called The Money Game, written by a game named Adam Smith. No kidding.