bmichaud Posted October 26, 2013 Share Posted October 26, 2013 It is a good question regarding who will hold the shares not offered in the IPO. Not sure what the ownership structure is at this point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wellmont Posted October 26, 2013 Share Posted October 26, 2013 I must admit this article by Eric Jackson is intriguing. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/10/04/will-no-dual-class-structure-create-a-bidding-war-for-twitter/ If Twitter is in fact "beachfront" tech property akin to Paypal or YouTube, then its rumored IPO valuation of $11B may be chump change. Only in the world of tech of course.... the $11-$14b number is simply a placeholder figure. What I suspect will happen is that they will go on the roadshow and there will be immense interest in the IPO. way oversubscribed. At that point they will raise the range, while still leaving room for an aftermarket "pop" and a runway for more gains going forward. The largest holder is Ev Williams @ 10%, who isn't selling a share in the IPO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wachtwoord Posted October 26, 2013 Share Posted October 26, 2013 I must admit this article by Eric Jackson is intriguing. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2013/10/04/will-no-dual-class-structure-create-a-bidding-war-for-twitter/ If Twitter is in fact "beachfront" tech property akin to Paypal or YouTube, then its rumored IPO valuation of $11B may be chump change. Only in the world of tech of course.... the $11-$14b number is simply a placeholder figure. What I suspect will happen is that they will go on the roadshow and there will be immense interest in the IPO. way oversubscribed. At that point they will raise the range, while still leaving room for an aftermarket "pop" and a runway for more gains going forward. The largest holder is Ev Williams @ 10%, who isn't selling a share in the IPO. Why leave room for a pop? When you sell something you want the highest amount you can get, which with these internet based IPOs usually is >3 times the actual value. What is this? A company losing money ($70.7 M in 2012, $133.8M thus far in 2013) on revenue of $253.6M in the first half year of 2013 and $168.6M in Q3. Evn in the optimistic case of 4 times Q3 this is only $675M in revenue so a $11B valuation means >16 times sales and $14B means almost 21 times sales. Thanks, but I'll pass :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wellmont Posted October 26, 2013 Share Posted October 26, 2013 because if you don't leave room for a pop you get the fb ipo debacle where they tried to extract every last penny. besides they are only selling a small portion of stock, which will create scarcity, increasing the likelihood that your next offering will be at an even richer valuation. This is the Plan anyway. Let's see if it works. It also sets up a perfect environment for insiders to lighten up. My take is the twitter bankers are being strategic, and betting on a positive fed/economy/market for the next several months. A successful twitter IPO could mean lots of follow on business for wall street as the floodgates open up for other concept stocks. The twitter bankers have been informed by the fb experience. If you are saying it's overvalued, that's merely self evident. the dirty little secret out there is that there is a rapidly growing number of new bubble stocks with insane valuations, twitter being the most recent example. shhhhh. don't tell anybody. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wachtwoord Posted October 27, 2013 Share Posted October 27, 2013 because if you don't leave room for a pop you get the fb ipo debacle where they tried to extract every last penny. besides they are only selling a small portion of stock, which will create scarcity, increasing the likelihood that your next offering will be at an even richer valuation. This is the Plan anyway. Let's see if it works. It also sets up a perfect environment for insiders to lighten up. My take is the twitter bankers are being strategic, and betting on a positive fed/economy/market for the next several months. A successful twitter IPO could mean lots of follow on business for wall street as the floodgates open up for other concept stocks. The twitter bankers have been informed by the fb experience. If you are saying it's overvalued, that's merely self evident. the dirty little secret out there is that there is a rapidly growing number of new bubble stocks with insane valuations, twitter being the most recent example. shhhhh. don't tell anybody. FB launch wasn't a debacle for those selling the stock! And the Twitter bankers might want to think strategic but in the end the stock will sell for w/e the owners ask for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest hellsten Posted October 27, 2013 Share Posted October 27, 2013 Twitter ARPU: http://qz.com/131932/twitter-average-revenue-per-user/ But it turns out we can calculate Twitter’s average advertising revenue per user using the other data it disclosed. See below for the full explanation and math, but it comes to $0.55 in the quarter that ended in June. That compares to Facebook’s $1.41 of average advertising revenue per user over the same period. Now that we have an ARPU guesstimate, we can figure out if Twitter is undervalued compared to Facebook and Google and potentially back up the truck at IPO ;) I wonder what George Soros would say about ARPU? Soros found his greatest profit opportunities in situations in which a market trend at first supports the “prevailing bias.” The conglomerate boom of the 1960s is a classic example in which the prevailing bias emphasized earnings growth over other fundamentals. The market favored companies that showed above-average growth. Rising stock prices allowed these companies to increase their earnings by using their increasing stock value to buy other companies. This in turn strengthened the prevailing bias, which led to further stock price increases, and so it went. The trend gained momentum until corporate results could no longer sustain investors’ expectations. I'm not familiar enough with the people who invest in social media companies to be able to identify any bias, but ARPU could be one… For example, Facebook uses it's stock valued at $x ARPU to buy a stock having a significantly lower ARPU. After the merger Mr. Market values the company using the highest ARPU (Facebook's). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest hellsten Posted October 27, 2013 Share Posted October 27, 2013 Twitter $11 billion / 218 million users = $50 Facebook $126 billion / 1.15 billion users = $109 LinkedIn $27 billion / 226 million users = $119 Skype $8.5 billion / 196 million users = $43 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted October 28, 2013 Author Share Posted October 28, 2013 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/twitter-prepares-to-feed-new-hunger-for-i-p-o-s/?ref=business&_r=0 Twitter Prepares to Feed New Hunger for I.P.O.’s Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted October 30, 2013 Author Share Posted October 30, 2013 Two Financial Advisers Accuse Twitter of Secondary Market Fraud http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/two-financial-advisers-accuse-twitter-of-secondary-market-fraud/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wellmont Posted November 5, 2013 Share Posted November 5, 2013 Twitter (TWTR), an online social networking and microblogging service, plans to raise $1.7 billion by offering 70.0 million shares at a price range of $23.00 to $25.00. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Twitter would command a market value of $16.6 billion. The company plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol TWTR. (Please note: Revised terms on 11/4/13. Previously planned to offer 70mm shares at a range of $17-$20.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aberhound Posted November 6, 2013 Share Posted November 6, 2013 We were an early user of Google. Adwords produced results an order of magnitude better than all other advertising whether print, radio, magazine or TV. Adwords allowed us to focus on a niche. Focus improves the quality. Twitter plus a blog is now an equally good way of getting traffic to your website. We tweet topical news articles which provide information helpful to our customers. People follow the tweets back to our website which provides the solutions. It works by edification. Edification is a sales method used by companies which want to improve sales. I learned of one water filter company who used edification to increase sales from zero to a billion USD in four years. Edification is where a third party provides the expert or celebrity opinion confirming the benefits that your product confers on the buyer. The trouble is that they don't have or I am unaware of a method to track the results. Google has always allowed us to track their results and there is a steady stream of incremental improvements. Right now Twitter has a little orange arrow icon and the word "promoted" to identify paid tweets. Although it might seem that a paid ad ruins the edification I doubt many will notice or remember. Few of my customers seem to notice or remember that the adword search results they conducted to find my business are paid ads. Most only remembered doing a keyword search. Eventually Twitter will find ways to monetize the traffic it generates. I would happily pay like for the service. I am sure that I have discovered only a few of the many potential benefits. Targeted leverage is a powerful tool. I don't invest in IPOs. I will watch with interest to see what they do to monetize. When a business creates so much value it will likely figure out how to capture a reasonable share of the value. I hope they are spending some of that R&D on developing a method to easily track and to measure results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ItsAValueTrap Posted November 6, 2013 Share Posted November 6, 2013 When a business creates so much value it will likely figure out how to capture a reasonable share of the value. If you look at Google... they've shut down a lot of products that created value. Google Checkout - A lot of people like Google Checkout. I would have used it over Paypal if it were available in Canada. Google Reader - The most popular RSS reader... now shut down. Gmail - Massively popular, doesn't monetize that well Firefox, Chrome - Massively popular, but doesn't monetize that well compared to search. Companies make browsers to drive search traffic (because some people just use the default), which drives advertising dollars. Right now that's how the game is being played. The various companies in the original tech boom - People thought that they would be able to monetize their traffic. It's funny now. Microsoft made a huge bet on the Internet, but unfortunately did not capitalize. WebTV was close to breakeven but Microsoft unfortunately bet on the wrong horse. Gates had no idea that the money on the Internet would be in search advertising, not in smart TVs or Hotmail or instant messaging. 2- I like sure things. Google and Facebook are currently highly profitable. So is Valueclick. These things monetize. I'm not sure if everything else monetizes. The chances aren't good. Some companies will go from being losers to being highly profitable companies. Google and Facebook went through that. I'm not good at figuring out who else will make that leap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wellmont Posted November 6, 2013 Share Posted November 6, 2013 the $11-$14b number is simply a placeholder figure. What I suspect will happen is that they will go on the roadshow and there will be immense interest in the IPO. way oversubscribed. At that point they will raise the range, while still leaving room for an aftermarket "pop" and a runway for more gains going forward. The largest holder is Ev Williams @ 10%, who isn't selling a share in the IPO. $twtr could price at $27 up from $17-$20 initial range. $19b market cap which is inline with my $20b prediction "for starters". they are also leaving room for "pop". :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wellmont Posted November 6, 2013 Share Posted November 6, 2013 and so it begins.... http://www.businessinsider.com/twitters-opening-trade-could-be-wild-2013-11 FBN NEWS: Twitter eyes $40 open-source worried demand pushes open to $80-source; ipo open cld be delayed till afternoon depending on price — Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) November 6, 2013 startin to party like it's 1999 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted November 6, 2013 Share Posted November 6, 2013 When a business creates so much value it will likely figure out how to capture a reasonable share of the value. If you look at Google... they've shut down a lot of products that created value. Google Checkout - A lot of people like Google Checkout. I would have used it over Paypal if it were available in Canada. Google Reader - The most popular RSS reader... now shut down. Gmail - Massively popular, doesn't monetize that well Firefox, Chrome - Massively popular, but doesn't monetize that well compared to search. Companies make browsers to drive search traffic (because some people just use the default), which drives advertising dollars. Right now that's how the game is being played. The various companies in the original tech boom - People thought that they would be able to monetize their traffic. It's funny now. Microsoft made a huge bet on the Internet, but unfortunately did not capitalize. WebTV was close to breakeven but Microsoft unfortunately bet on the wrong horse. Gates had no idea that the money on the Internet would be in search advertising, not in smart TVs or Hotmail or instant messaging. 2- I like sure things. Google and Facebook are currently highly profitable. So is Valueclick. These things monetize. I'm not sure if everything else monetizes. The chances aren't good. Some companies will go from being losers to being highly profitable companies. Google and Facebook went through that. I'm not good at figuring out who else will make that leap. If you look at Twitter's revenues, it looks like they've already begun to capture the value. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted November 7, 2013 Author Share Posted November 7, 2013 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-06/twitter-raises-1-82-billion-pricing-ipo-above-offering-range.html Twitter Raises $1.82 Billion Pricing IPO Above Offer Range Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SmallCap Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 Unrelated to the Twitter IPO that everyone is talking about but I found this to be very interesting article about what a tweet is made up of and what long term implications this will have. Twitter’s founders recognized that encouraging people to use a very small number of very tightly controlled forms, billions of times over, creates huge, deeply interconnected, highly creative, and potentially profitable new space. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-07/the-hidden-technology-that-makes-twitter-huge Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest wellmont Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 Cory Johnson @CoryTV #TwitterIPO opens at $45.10, 58.6x sales, making it the single most expensive stock in technology. $TWTR Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest 50centdollars Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 twitter up 85% on debut Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 And we are surprised? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 Get ready for long series of :'( :'( about "tech bubbles" for the forseeable future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted November 7, 2013 Author Share Posted November 7, 2013 And we are surprised? ' nope, not at all Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCG Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 For comparison, TWTR is currently valued at 3x the amount of Safeway, 2x Best Buy, 3X Sears, 2X Whirlpool, nearly 2x Paychex, and about the same as John Deere & Kraft, yet makes no profit. This market is silly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest valueInv Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 For comparison, TWTR is currently valued at 3x the amount of Safeway, 2x Best Buy, 3X Sears, 2X Whirlpool, nearly 2x Paychex, and about the same as John Deere & Kraft, yet makes no profit. This market is silly. Which is why value investing exists. Cheers to that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
value-is-what-you-get Posted November 7, 2013 Share Posted November 7, 2013 I bet WEB is beating himself up for blowing 25 billion on BNSF when he coulda bought Twitter! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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