14 ms·

Snap's share price sinks, trades just above IPO price

149 points by mudil 9y ago

chollida1 9y ago
Well........ - no control by stock owners - no immediate plans to produce profits - whistleblower lawsuit in the works by former employee who claims they seriously inflated user metrics - a shitload of shares about to become free trading, with a declining share price, you've got to think alot of employees are going to go stampeding to the exits rather than holding - record short interest by the street - one of the main IPO banks (JP Morgan) just cut their target from $20 to $18 for the stock, - The same bank doesn't have an almost guaranteed BUY rating on the stock, and has rated it as a HOLD/Neutral, which is the equivalent of a sell in sell side analyst parlance - a miss on their first earnings - their biggest rival, Instagram, is doing well in competing with them, and they have Facebook's large pile of money and audience behind them - and the macro climate of people expecting a market cooling coming soon, in those cases people tend to flock away from speculative companies to the old fashioned kind that make money. SNAP might be a long term good company, but its going to be a rocky ride in the short term.
- BlackjackCF 9y ago
  I really liked Snapchat. It was new and fun, and innovative when it first came out. But they've really failed to fight against FB coming into their market with Instagram.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  > a shitload of shares about to become free trading, with a declining share price, you've got to think alot of employees are going to go stampeding to the exits rather than holding > record short interest by the street This is double counting the same thing. The reason there's short interest is because there's a bunch of employees that would like to sell now but cannot. I suspect that much of these short positions will close out when the lock-up ends and employees sell into the market. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't back-channel deals along the lines of "you short it now and close when my lockup period ends, and I'll use my locked-up long position to unofficially hedge for you".
  - module0000 9y ago
    Unofficial(as in, one entity hedging for a separate entity) hedging is 1) illegal and 2) very inefficient and prone to screw you at tax time. But realistically... you know non-wealthy stockholders(ie employees) want to cash in, so you buy into the retail sell-off on lockup day, bid it up 3 points, then close when you see the other retail buyers chasing the rally. Closing several thousand long shares should be sufficient to run their stops, depress the price, and present you with another buying opportunity at or near your original entry price. All that said.. guessing what will happen with the market is how you lose your money, and fail at day trading before you ever got started.
    - alasdair_ 9y ago
      If, say, a person owns $5MM of snapchat stock and their spouse knows this, can their spouse (acting rationally) not simply short or buy a put option for some portion of this? They didn't agree to anything in the RSU agreement and no long as the spouse wasn't acting on insider information and simply wanted to hedge, I'm not certain a crime would have been committed, unless the person owning the shares actually asked their spouse to perform this action.
      - module0000 9y ago
        On paper: yes, that sounds good. BUT, if the SEC comes knocking...they operate in a way that looks like "guilty until proven innocent", and having your spouse do it appears at first glance as guilty. The RSU agreement would be important to see though, they may have some bits about spouses and immediate family - or they may not(in which case what you described is 100% above board). If anyone holding RSU's is (legally) able to show the RSU agreement, it would be insightful to read.
  - whatok 9y ago
    I don't know what their RSU agreement is like but typically you are not able to short your own stock.
    - 9y ago
- nihonde 9y ago
  Also, no foothold and lots of strong incumbents in Asia, so no growth opportunities there.
steevenwee 9y ago
I wonder if Facebook going to repeat that.
- acchow 9y ago
  FB had $10.2bn net income in 2016 on $27.6bn revenue. How can it drop back to its $100bn IPO valuation?
  - zjaffee 9y ago
    If FB were to stop growing at the rate it has been, ~100bn would be a reasonable target market cap, given a P.E. Ratio of around 10.
    - acchow 9y ago
      2017 is half over. Facebook is going to make about $14bn net income in 2017. At a PE of 10 that's $140bn. The S&P has an average PE of 15.6. That brings us to $218bn. It's mindboggling any of you can think FB would drop back to IPO valuation at this size. Maybe in 40 years when the world has changed dramatically and most of us are retired or dead.
- usuallybaffled 9y ago
  Facebook is way over that kind of instability.
minimaxir 9y ago
Snap hedged their existence on the Spectacles/hardware (https://www.spectacles.com https://www.spectacles.com) to the point of rebranding themselves as a "camera" company in the SEC filing. Has anyone seen/heard about the Spectacles used since the initial hype?
- mahyarm 9y ago
  I can't buy it on amazon for the retail price.
- cryptoz 9y ago
  While I haven't read the SEC filing myself, isn't the idea of them being a camera company more of a software play than a hardware one? Even with Spectables, that's how I took it: most of Snapchat is things-that-people-thing-other-cameras-should-do-but-can't, and that's what makes them a camera company without making and selling lots of cameras. I'm not sure though.
  - hbcondo714 9y ago
    Yes, their quarterly report SEC filing[1] literally says "Snap Inc. is a camera company" [1] https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/snap/0001564590-17-010357.htm#NOTES_TO_CONSOLIDATED_FINANCIAL_STATEMEN https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/snap/0001564590-17-01035...
    - doublerebel 9y ago
      Yes, believing in Snap is believing they have the AR market. If you watch the latest Facebook conference and their AR announcement, Zuckerburg attacks this directly by calling the Camera the next "platform" as if we are installing apps directly onto the Camera. [0] Facebook is clearly the follower here, there are a number of awkward jokes and it's clear Facebook doesn't "get" AR or the Snapchat userbase. Snap is the first (primarily US) company to actually get users to use AR and QR codes (in the form of Snapcodes), not to mention the first social network to do it. Spectacles are the first camera that helps you experience video from the perspective of the person taking it. This is actually a long time coming, for anyone who watches Snapchat with the headphones in (think every kid 27 and younger because they are always listening to music), Snapchat is a very immersive experience -- today's mics are very sensitive and the realism of Snapchat makes you feel like you are there. Spectacles just take that to the next level, they will already be ready as immersive video glasses become popular. I'm way long on Snap philosophically but do not hold a position. I'm also in the AR space and I see Snap in the lead. [0]: https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/18/facebook-reveals-its-camera-centric-ar-future/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/18/facebook-reveals-its-cam...
komali2 9y ago
Facebook is playing pretty vicously - adding stories to three of its apps, when realistically the only app that is similar to snapchat is Instagram - but I'm happy for it either way. Facebook apps do some stupid shit, like in Messenger, why the fuck does the back button take me into a camera looking at my ugly mug? Why does swiping down from the top to get to the top of my messages list sometimes again open a camera to my double chins? What in the shit is going on with the stupid circles smack-dab in the middle of my conversation history? And why on earth can't I swap the camera around mid-video in an instagram vid? But it's nothing, nothing compared to the crime against humanity that is the Snapchat UX. It is an abomination, and a buggy one at that. I've heard it's at least more responsive on iPhone, fine. I've even heard arguments that it's esoteric on purpose - you have to be young and "with it" to "get it." Friends have to ask eachother "omg how did you do that filter" or whatever, which allows a moment of millenial smugness. Fine, that can be a reason, and we can lump it in amongst the thousands of other UX charges we should levy against Snapchat.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  > But it's nothing, nothing compared to the crime against humanity that is the Snapchat UX. Every time Snapchat's UI/UX is brought up on Hacker News it's praised as "it facilitates the joy of feature discovery!" (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859860) It's a post-hoc rationalization that I am still not happy with. (even moreso 2 years later with more apps like Facebook/Skype copying Snapchat verbatim)
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    Devil's advocate: Instagram is not a "serious" photo app. It's strictly for fun. if you want to shoot serious pictures, you use a purpose built app, or heck, even the built-in app on your phone. Making the UI a hide-and-seek game, or at least abandoning traditional UI design for something that puts form over function makes sense in that context. There's an actual game on Steam called "Please, don't touch anything" where this kind of random discovery is the whole point. Not sure I'd prejudicially dismiss it as "millennial smugness" though.
neuronexmachina 9y ago
"Snapchat is popular among people under 30 who enjoy applying bunny faces and vomiting rainbows onto their selfies, but many on Wall Street are critical of its high valuation, slowing user growth and lack of profitability. Snap has warned it may never become profitable."
- t4h9drg 9y ago
  "Snap has warned it may never become profitable." Then why the hell was there an IPO?!?!
  - quantdev 9y ago
    They "warned" in an SEC filing that is supposed to state possible investor risks. The way this was reported is the problem and not Snap's statement, which any investor should understand is factually correct. Snap is a volatile play: there's a high chance, maybe bigger than 50%, that it never becomes profitable, as they warn, and there's some small chance it becomes extremely profitable. The real question is, what's the net present expected value?
  - zjaffee 9y ago
    Companies do this so that they don't get sued for lying in the event that things don't always go well.
usuallybaffled 9y ago
Isn't it weird that the stock exchange where you're also runs an article with your smashed logo? I'd expect a more "robotic" reporting from nasdaq.com
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  It's a Reuters article. NASDAQ presumably purchases a feed for financial news.
- toephu2 9y ago
  SNAP is on the NYSE not Nasdaq.
mikek 9y ago
There is large downward pressure on the stock due to an impending lockup period expiry. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snap-short-sellers-bet-on-a-post-lockup-tumble-but-it-isnt-a-sure-thing-2017-06-08 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snap-short-sellers-bet-on-a...
- acchow 9y ago
  Why wouldn't this have been priced in? Why does everyone and their uncle think they can predict stock movements with lockup periods?
  - module0000 9y ago
    "Why does everyone and their uncle...." They don't. But every amateur with zero experience does.
dando 9y ago
A huge part of the tech market is down like 10%
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wonder_bread 9y ago
Seems like kind of a prime time to increase your holding if you bought shares on the IPO and have any faith in the vision of the company. Having such an intense fight against such a dominating company could kill Snap, or it could be the disadvantage they need to be successful in the long term. How often is it that the now-huge tech (or any industry) firms DON'T go through trying times when they first appeared on the markets? -Apple kicked Steve Jobs out of the company convinced the monolithic giant IBM was going to cut them out of the equation. -Amazon almost went bankrupt when the market crashed -Facebook dropped for almost a year when it wasn't obvious how they were going to monetize their mobile platform profitably -Nike got hit with a customs battle brought on by Converse for millions Obviously it remains to be seen whether they will show the resilience the aforementioned companies did but the fact that some are already speaking of Snap in the past tense is kind of crazy, they've had ONE quarterly report come out since the IPO.
- mrleinad 9y ago
  This is the analysis I make based on what someone with a lot more experience in the markets told me a few days ago, related to $SNAP. - Apple was a company that sold computers. SJ being kicked was an relevant event for the company, but it still sold computers and was worth something. - Amazon was an intermediary between sellers and buyers. Today is a company that invested a lot in other things and is worth something. - Facebook could be monetizing something, but it's still just a webpage. Remains to be seen if it's worth something, so their shares are crap (this is from a fundamental point of view, regardless of whether they keep rising) - Nike sells shoes. It's worth something, though it's not a fundamental company for the market. SNAP, on the other hand, has some face recognition algorithms, and created a free app. That's it. It produces nothing. It's a worthless company when it comes down to the assets it has and the product it sells.
  - PKop 9y ago
    SNAP might be a terrible investment at this point (I tend to think so because I don't think they can overcome challenge from Facebook) but based only on your points above, we'd have to conclude Google is "worthless" as well no? Selling something vs nothing is a good metric to think about, but "advertising" is certainly not nothing. In fact, it's a multi-billion $ industry. It just so happens to be dominated by Google and FB currently, who are both "fundamentally" selling something real.
brightball 9y ago
Isn't that pretty normal in the months post IPO while everybody gets past the initial excitement while the business starts working on long term plans with all the money?
ChuckMcM 9y ago
One need only look at Facebook which traded well below its IPO price 6 months later to understand this is a non-metric. All it "means" as far as I can tell is that the traders who got their 'bump' in the IPO wanted to dump their holdings and so have been continually selling. It will be really interesting when internal shareholders (aka employees) get unlocked and can sell their shares. A lot of people using their now vested and tradable equity to convert it into something like a down payment or a new car. Once that first wave has passed, then you can start looking at the stock price and trying to see what the market thinks of the company.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"All it "means" as far as I can tell is that the traders who got their 'bump' in the IPO wanted to dump their holdings and so have been continually selling." Can you explain what is a 'bump' that traders get in the IPO?
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    Simply put, most IPOs are 'priced' such that the stock will go up after the IPO. So traders during the roadshow agree to buy shares at the IPO price and then they turn around and sell those shares for a profit when the stock goes up and people (nominally retail investors) are trying to buy the stock. They do this carefully so as not to put the stock in a huge tail spin. So lets say you're Fidelity, and you've got a billion dollar fund, you take 10 million out of that, commit it to the IPO and sell it when the stock goes up 20%. You now have 12 million to put back into your fund and you've added 2 basis points to the "return" for your fund (shares are now worth 1.002 B$.) The trick though is that you are not really "investing in SNAP" so much as you're taking advantage of a pricing advantage of a highly anticipated offering.
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      Sure, the "road show" is to sell to big institutional investors like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds etc but not to "traders" per se. I think that's what confused me. I'm guessing someone like Fidelity might have their own trading desk?
mmanfrin 9y ago
"Sinks" is a particularly strong word for a 3.4% drop on the day after a rate hike and during a 'tech selloff'.
andreasklinger 9y ago
While i am personally very skeptical about Snap. We had similar blogposts about facebook - even google to an extend.
- rchaud 9y ago
  The difference with FB was that it rapidly shifted out of its "exclusive" user group by expanding outside of university email address holders to allowing everyone and their grandma from joining. Once Snap inevitably cleans up its UI to stoop to trying to attract older audiences, what appeal will it have?
module0000 9y ago
Want to know what the stock is going to do? Look at your order book in PM on lockup day. Liquidity on either side will indicate short term direction, and the liquidity vacuum on the other side will indicate longer term direction. disclaimer: short term is 10-15 minutes, long term is 1h or more up to RTH close
eganist 9y ago
I just don't like what Snap did to the Windows Phone platform. They consistently blocked all opportunities to place an app on the service even when offered to do so with some form of partial or total subsidy (citation needed, but I'm pretty sure I'm referring to 6snap here). So in that regard, I'm oddly happy about what's going on.
- alasdair_ 9y ago
  The problem is that (effectively) no one uses that platform. It's not just the initial creation that is the problem - maintaining a windows phone app over the years to come would be a real pain in the ass, and would slow future updates.
  - underwater 9y ago
    There were existing third party apps that they forced to shut down. Understandable if it's competing against a native app, but that wasn't the case.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
htormey 9y ago
I think people are writing off Snapchat prematurely after its first soft quarter. It takes a long time to build a successful advertising driven consumer application. I agree that Facebook’s aggressive cloning of stories has impacted Snapchat but I think Snapchat is more than just a one feature company. I’d give it at least a year or so before declaring Snapchat a losing proposition. I say this because making significant changes to a product at Snapchat’s scale, I.e shipping new features, takes time. Unlike Twitter, I’ve been impressed with the amount of product that Snapchat has shipped over the last few years. I think the ability to ship a lot of product is a key thing that a lot of arm chair analysts neglect when talking about these applications. I’d also add to the above that I think a lot of people on his thread see Snapchat and Instagram as interchangeable applications. I’m not so sure about that. I use both for very different purposes. Another point people seem to forget is that Snapchat own Bitmoji. That app has been consistently in the top 5 apps on the AppStore every time I’ve checked over the last 6 months. I think the fact that Snap were able to buy another social company and not mess it up is highly underrated. Especially when you compare Bitmoji to what happened with Vine at Twitter.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Most of the comments here already talk about UX or other standard 'issues' with Snapchat, so I wanted to raise a different one— On Snapchat, there isn't much to do once you're done seeing your friends' snaps. Instagram has an amazing discoverability feature, plus, you can go around visiting other people's profiles as long as they are public. Ditto on FB, where there is an endless list of things to do and see and explore without interacting with anyone or letting them know of your actions. On Snapchat, there is nothing of that sort. Snaps are temporary, Stories only stay for 24 hrs, and you can't see anyone's content without them getting a notification (last I checked). Sure, this prevents 'stalking', but that comes at the cost of engagement.
- peasantking 9y ago
  > On Snapchat, there isn't much to do once you're done seeing your friends' snaps. I'd argue that this does keep you coming back regularly to see what's new
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    You get notifications when people people send you snaps. 24-hour stories don't need you to be on the app the whole time. For example, I check my Instagram and Messenger stories once a day and that is good enough.
sjbase 9y ago
Worth pointing out that tech stocks are down heavily in June, esp. consumer tech [1]. Some portion of this decline is unrelated to investor confidence in Snapchat relative to FB etc. [1]: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/09/big-five-tech-stocks-sell-off-facebook-apple-amazon-microsoft-alphabet.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/09/big-five-tech-stocks-sell-off...
dzonga 9y ago
The stuff that made Snapchat fun i.e Filters, Stories are becoming native to the platform e.g through ARKit and being copied aggressively by Zucker Zucker. I feel sorry for them, even though they were a pioneer into to leverage the smartphone's camera. Irrelevant but maybe relevant point, is us college guys mostly use it to chat with girls or just to be sure girls we wanna fuxk look good.
noamsml 9y ago
I'm no expert on snapchat, but one thing I can say from personal experience being at an IPOing unicorn -- until about a year into our IPO, we were a "no buy", and all of these giant companies were ostensibly going to crush us with products that didn't even compete with us. Then, one year and a couple of earnings calls in, we're suddenly a "buy" and people consider us stable and successful. What did I learn from this? Never trust the stock market, and doubly so do not trust the stock market with a new stock.
- dilemma 9y ago
  I think the leason is to have a viable business with earnings.
nemo44x 9y ago
On Hacker News we are enthusiastic about Snapchat as a technology without any value in terms of being technologically interesting or useful. But yet we are littered with blockchain skeptics.

149 points by mudil 9y ago

Well........ - no control by stock owners - no immediate plans to produce profits - whistleblower lawsuit in the works by former employee who claims they seriously inflated user metrics - a shitload of shares about to become free trading, with a declining share price, you've got to think alot of employees are going to go stampeding to the exits rather than holding - record short interest by the street - one of the main IPO banks (JP Morgan) just cut their target from $20 to $18 for the stock, - The same bank doesn't have an almost guaranteed BUY rating on the stock, and has rated it as a HOLD/Neutral, which is the equivalent of a sell in sell side analyst parlance - a miss on their first earnings - their biggest rival, Instagram, is doing well in competing with them, and they have Facebook's large pile of money and audience behind them - and the macro climate of people expecting a market cooling coming soon, in those cases people tend to flock away from speculative companies to the old fashioned kind that make money. SNAP might be a long term good company, but its going to be a rocky ride in the short term.

BlackjackCF 9y ago
I really liked Snapchat. It was new and fun, and innovative when it first came out. But they've really failed to fight against FB coming into their market with Instagram.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
> a shitload of shares about to become free trading, with a declining share price, you've got to think alot of employees are going to go stampeding to the exits rather than holding > record short interest by the street This is double counting the same thing. The reason there's short interest is because there's a bunch of employees that would like to sell now but cannot. I suspect that much of these short positions will close out when the lock-up ends and employees sell into the market. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't back-channel deals along the lines of "you short it now and close when my lockup period ends, and I'll use my locked-up long position to unofficially hedge for you".
- module0000 9y ago
  Unofficial(as in, one entity hedging for a separate entity) hedging is 1) illegal and 2) very inefficient and prone to screw you at tax time. But realistically... you know non-wealthy stockholders(ie employees) want to cash in, so you buy into the retail sell-off on lockup day, bid it up 3 points, then close when you see the other retail buyers chasing the rally. Closing several thousand long shares should be sufficient to run their stops, depress the price, and present you with another buying opportunity at or near your original entry price. All that said.. guessing what will happen with the market is how you lose your money, and fail at day trading before you ever got started.
  - alasdair_ 9y ago
    If, say, a person owns $5MM of snapchat stock and their spouse knows this, can their spouse (acting rationally) not simply short or buy a put option for some portion of this? They didn't agree to anything in the RSU agreement and no long as the spouse wasn't acting on insider information and simply wanted to hedge, I'm not certain a crime would have been committed, unless the person owning the shares actually asked their spouse to perform this action.
    - module0000 9y ago
      On paper: yes, that sounds good. BUT, if the SEC comes knocking...they operate in a way that looks like "guilty until proven innocent", and having your spouse do it appears at first glance as guilty. The RSU agreement would be important to see though, they may have some bits about spouses and immediate family - or they may not(in which case what you described is 100% above board). If anyone holding RSU's is (legally) able to show the RSU agreement, it would be insightful to read.
- whatok 9y ago
  I don't know what their RSU agreement is like but typically you are not able to short your own stock.
  - 9y ago
nihonde 9y ago
Also, no foothold and lots of strong incumbents in Asia, so no growth opportunities there.

steevenwee 9y ago

I wonder if Facebook going to repeat that.

acchow 9y ago
FB had $10.2bn net income in 2016 on $27.6bn revenue. How can it drop back to its $100bn IPO valuation?
- zjaffee 9y ago
  If FB were to stop growing at the rate it has been, ~100bn would be a reasonable target market cap, given a P.E. Ratio of around 10.
  - acchow 9y ago
    2017 is half over. Facebook is going to make about $14bn net income in 2017. At a PE of 10 that's $140bn. The S&P has an average PE of 15.6. That brings us to $218bn. It's mindboggling any of you can think FB would drop back to IPO valuation at this size. Maybe in 40 years when the world has changed dramatically and most of us are retired or dead.
usuallybaffled 9y ago
Facebook is way over that kind of instability.

minimaxir 9y ago

Snap hedged their existence on the Spectacles/hardware (https://www.spectacles.com https://www.spectacles.com) to the point of rebranding themselves as a "camera" company in the SEC filing. Has anyone seen/heard about the Spectacles used since the initial hype?

mahyarm 9y ago
I can't buy it on amazon for the retail price.
cryptoz 9y ago
While I haven't read the SEC filing myself, isn't the idea of them being a camera company more of a software play than a hardware one? Even with Spectables, that's how I took it: most of Snapchat is things-that-people-thing-other-cameras-should-do-but-can't, and that's what makes them a camera company without making and selling lots of cameras. I'm not sure though.
- hbcondo714 9y ago
  Yes, their quarterly report SEC filing[1] literally says "Snap Inc. is a camera company" [1] https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/snap/0001564590-17-010357.htm#NOTES_TO_CONSOLIDATED_FINANCIAL_STATEMEN https://www.last10k.com/sec-filings/snap/0001564590-17-01035...
  - doublerebel 9y ago
    Yes, believing in Snap is believing they have the AR market. If you watch the latest Facebook conference and their AR announcement, Zuckerburg attacks this directly by calling the Camera the next "platform" as if we are installing apps directly onto the Camera. [0] Facebook is clearly the follower here, there are a number of awkward jokes and it's clear Facebook doesn't "get" AR or the Snapchat userbase. Snap is the first (primarily US) company to actually get users to use AR and QR codes (in the form of Snapcodes), not to mention the first social network to do it. Spectacles are the first camera that helps you experience video from the perspective of the person taking it. This is actually a long time coming, for anyone who watches Snapchat with the headphones in (think every kid 27 and younger because they are always listening to music), Snapchat is a very immersive experience -- today's mics are very sensitive and the realism of Snapchat makes you feel like you are there. Spectacles just take that to the next level, they will already be ready as immersive video glasses become popular. I'm way long on Snap philosophically but do not hold a position. I'm also in the AR space and I see Snap in the lead. [0]: https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/18/facebook-reveals-its-camera-centric-ar-future/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/18/facebook-reveals-its-cam...

komali2 9y ago

Facebook is playing pretty vicously - adding stories to three of its apps, when realistically the only app that is similar to snapchat is Instagram - but I'm happy for it either way. Facebook apps do some stupid shit, like in Messenger, why the fuck does the back button take me into a camera looking at my ugly mug? Why does swiping down from the top to get to the top of my messages list sometimes again open a camera to my double chins? What in the shit is going on with the stupid circles smack-dab in the middle of my conversation history? And why on earth can't I swap the camera around mid-video in an instagram vid? But it's nothing, nothing compared to the crime against humanity that is the Snapchat UX. It is an abomination, and a buggy one at that. I've heard it's at least more responsive on iPhone, fine. I've even heard arguments that it's esoteric on purpose - you have to be young and "with it" to "get it." Friends have to ask eachother "omg how did you do that filter" or whatever, which allows a moment of millenial smugness. Fine, that can be a reason, and we can lump it in amongst the thousands of other UX charges we should levy against Snapchat.

minimaxir 9y ago
> But it's nothing, nothing compared to the crime against humanity that is the Snapchat UX. Every time Snapchat's UI/UX is brought up on Hacker News it's praised as "it facilitates the joy of feature discovery!" (example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859860) It's a post-hoc rationalization that I am still not happy with. (even moreso 2 years later with more apps like Facebook/Skype copying Snapchat verbatim)
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Devil's advocate: Instagram is not a "serious" photo app. It's strictly for fun. if you want to shoot serious pictures, you use a purpose built app, or heck, even the built-in app on your phone. Making the UI a hide-and-seek game, or at least abandoning traditional UI design for something that puts form over function makes sense in that context. There's an actual game on Steam called "Please, don't touch anything" where this kind of random discovery is the whole point. Not sure I'd prejudicially dismiss it as "millennial smugness" though.

neuronexmachina 9y ago

"Snapchat is popular among people under 30 who enjoy applying bunny faces and vomiting rainbows onto their selfies, but many on Wall Street are critical of its high valuation, slowing user growth and lack of profitability. Snap has warned it may never become profitable."

t4h9drg 9y ago
"Snap has warned it may never become profitable." Then why the hell was there an IPO?!?!
- quantdev 9y ago
  They "warned" in an SEC filing that is supposed to state possible investor risks. The way this was reported is the problem and not Snap's statement, which any investor should understand is factually correct. Snap is a volatile play: there's a high chance, maybe bigger than 50%, that it never becomes profitable, as they warn, and there's some small chance it becomes extremely profitable. The real question is, what's the net present expected value?
- zjaffee 9y ago
  Companies do this so that they don't get sued for lying in the event that things don't always go well.

usuallybaffled 9y ago

Isn't it weird that the stock exchange where you're also runs an article with your smashed logo? I'd expect a more "robotic" reporting from nasdaq.com

ceejayoz 9y ago
It's a Reuters article. NASDAQ presumably purchases a feed for financial news.
toephu2 9y ago
SNAP is on the NYSE not Nasdaq.

mikek 9y ago

There is large downward pressure on the stock due to an impending lockup period expiry. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snap-short-sellers-bet-on-a-post-lockup-tumble-but-it-isnt-a-sure-thing-2017-06-08 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/snap-short-sellers-bet-on-a...

acchow 9y ago
Why wouldn't this have been priced in? Why does everyone and their uncle think they can predict stock movements with lockup periods?
- module0000 9y ago
  "Why does everyone and their uncle...." They don't. But every amateur with zero experience does.

dando 9y ago

A huge part of the tech market is down like 10%

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wonder_bread 9y ago

Seems like kind of a prime time to increase your holding if you bought shares on the IPO and have any faith in the vision of the company. Having such an intense fight against such a dominating company could kill Snap, or it could be the disadvantage they need to be successful in the long term. How often is it that the now-huge tech (or any industry) firms DON'T go through trying times when they first appeared on the markets? -Apple kicked Steve Jobs out of the company convinced the monolithic giant IBM was going to cut them out of the equation. -Amazon almost went bankrupt when the market crashed -Facebook dropped for almost a year when it wasn't obvious how they were going to monetize their mobile platform profitably -Nike got hit with a customs battle brought on by Converse for millions Obviously it remains to be seen whether they will show the resilience the aforementioned companies did but the fact that some are already speaking of Snap in the past tense is kind of crazy, they've had ONE quarterly report come out since the IPO.

mrleinad 9y ago
This is the analysis I make based on what someone with a lot more experience in the markets told me a few days ago, related to $SNAP. - Apple was a company that sold computers. SJ being kicked was an relevant event for the company, but it still sold computers and was worth something. - Amazon was an intermediary between sellers and buyers. Today is a company that invested a lot in other things and is worth something. - Facebook could be monetizing something, but it's still just a webpage. Remains to be seen if it's worth something, so their shares are crap (this is from a fundamental point of view, regardless of whether they keep rising) - Nike sells shoes. It's worth something, though it's not a fundamental company for the market. SNAP, on the other hand, has some face recognition algorithms, and created a free app. That's it. It produces nothing. It's a worthless company when it comes down to the assets it has and the product it sells.
- PKop 9y ago
  SNAP might be a terrible investment at this point (I tend to think so because I don't think they can overcome challenge from Facebook) but based only on your points above, we'd have to conclude Google is "worthless" as well no? Selling something vs nothing is a good metric to think about, but "advertising" is certainly not nothing. In fact, it's a multi-billion $ industry. It just so happens to be dominated by Google and FB currently, who are both "fundamentally" selling something real.

brightball 9y ago

Isn't that pretty normal in the months post IPO while everybody gets past the initial excitement while the business starts working on long term plans with all the money?

ChuckMcM 9y ago

One need only look at Facebook which traded well below its IPO price 6 months later to understand this is a non-metric. All it "means" as far as I can tell is that the traders who got their 'bump' in the IPO wanted to dump their holdings and so have been continually selling. It will be really interesting when internal shareholders (aka employees) get unlocked and can sell their shares. A lot of people using their now vested and tradable equity to convert it into something like a down payment or a new car. Once that first wave has passed, then you can start looking at the stock price and trying to see what the market thinks of the company.

bogomipz 9y ago
>"All it "means" as far as I can tell is that the traders who got their 'bump' in the IPO wanted to dump their holdings and so have been continually selling." Can you explain what is a 'bump' that traders get in the IPO?
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Simply put, most IPOs are 'priced' such that the stock will go up after the IPO. So traders during the roadshow agree to buy shares at the IPO price and then they turn around and sell those shares for a profit when the stock goes up and people (nominally retail investors) are trying to buy the stock. They do this carefully so as not to put the stock in a huge tail spin. So lets say you're Fidelity, and you've got a billion dollar fund, you take 10 million out of that, commit it to the IPO and sell it when the stock goes up 20%. You now have 12 million to put back into your fund and you've added 2 basis points to the "return" for your fund (shares are now worth 1.002 B$.) The trick though is that you are not really "investing in SNAP" so much as you're taking advantage of a pricing advantage of a highly anticipated offering.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    Sure, the "road show" is to sell to big institutional investors like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds etc but not to "traders" per se. I think that's what confused me. I'm guessing someone like Fidelity might have their own trading desk?

mmanfrin 9y ago

"Sinks" is a particularly strong word for a 3.4% drop on the day after a rate hike and during a 'tech selloff'.

andreasklinger 9y ago

While i am personally very skeptical about Snap. We had similar blogposts about facebook - even google to an extend.

rchaud 9y ago
The difference with FB was that it rapidly shifted out of its "exclusive" user group by expanding outside of university email address holders to allowing everyone and their grandma from joining. Once Snap inevitably cleans up its UI to stoop to trying to attract older audiences, what appeal will it have?

module0000 9y ago

Want to know what the stock is going to do? Look at your order book in PM on lockup day. Liquidity on either side will indicate short term direction, and the liquidity vacuum on the other side will indicate longer term direction. disclaimer: short term is 10-15 minutes, long term is 1h or more up to RTH close

eganist 9y ago

I just don't like what Snap did to the Windows Phone platform. They consistently blocked all opportunities to place an app on the service even when offered to do so with some form of partial or total subsidy (citation needed, but I'm pretty sure I'm referring to 6snap here). So in that regard, I'm oddly happy about what's going on.

alasdair_ 9y ago
The problem is that (effectively) no one uses that platform. It's not just the initial creation that is the problem - maintaining a windows phone app over the years to come would be a real pain in the ass, and would slow future updates.
- underwater 9y ago
  There were existing third party apps that they forced to shut down. Understandable if it's competing against a native app, but that wasn't the case.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

htormey 9y ago

I think people are writing off Snapchat prematurely after its first soft quarter. It takes a long time to build a successful advertising driven consumer application. I agree that Facebook’s aggressive cloning of stories has impacted Snapchat but I think Snapchat is more than just a one feature company. I’d give it at least a year or so before declaring Snapchat a losing proposition. I say this because making significant changes to a product at Snapchat’s scale, I.e shipping new features, takes time. Unlike Twitter, I’ve been impressed with the amount of product that Snapchat has shipped over the last few years. I think the ability to ship a lot of product is a key thing that a lot of arm chair analysts neglect when talking about these applications. I’d also add to the above that I think a lot of people on his thread see Snapchat and Instagram as interchangeable applications. I’m not so sure about that. I use both for very different purposes. Another point people seem to forget is that Snapchat own Bitmoji. That app has been consistently in the top 5 apps on the AppStore every time I’ve checked over the last 6 months. I think the fact that Snap were able to buy another social company and not mess it up is highly underrated. Especially when you compare Bitmoji to what happened with Vine at Twitter.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago

Most of the comments here already talk about UX or other standard 'issues' with Snapchat, so I wanted to raise a different one— On Snapchat, there isn't much to do once you're done seeing your friends' snaps. Instagram has an amazing discoverability feature, plus, you can go around visiting other people's profiles as long as they are public. Ditto on FB, where there is an endless list of things to do and see and explore without interacting with anyone or letting them know of your actions. On Snapchat, there is nothing of that sort. Snaps are temporary, Stories only stay for 24 hrs, and you can't see anyone's content without them getting a notification (last I checked). Sure, this prevents 'stalking', but that comes at the cost of engagement.

peasantking 9y ago
> On Snapchat, there isn't much to do once you're done seeing your friends' snaps. I'd argue that this does keep you coming back regularly to see what's new
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  You get notifications when people people send you snaps. 24-hour stories don't need you to be on the app the whole time. For example, I check my Instagram and Messenger stories once a day and that is good enough.

sjbase 9y ago

Worth pointing out that tech stocks are down heavily in June, esp. consumer tech [1]. Some portion of this decline is unrelated to investor confidence in Snapchat relative to FB etc. [1]: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/09/big-five-tech-stocks-sell-off-facebook-apple-amazon-microsoft-alphabet.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/09/big-five-tech-stocks-sell-off...

dzonga 9y ago

The stuff that made Snapchat fun i.e Filters, Stories are becoming native to the platform e.g through ARKit and being copied aggressively by Zucker Zucker. I feel sorry for them, even though they were a pioneer into to leverage the smartphone's camera. Irrelevant but maybe relevant point, is us college guys mostly use it to chat with girls or just to be sure girls we wanna fuxk look good.

noamsml 9y ago

I'm no expert on snapchat, but one thing I can say from personal experience being at an IPOing unicorn -- until about a year into our IPO, we were a "no buy", and all of these giant companies were ostensibly going to crush us with products that didn't even compete with us. Then, one year and a couple of earnings calls in, we're suddenly a "buy" and people consider us stable and successful. What did I learn from this? Never trust the stock market, and doubly so do not trust the stock market with a new stock.

dilemma 9y ago
I think the leason is to have a viable business with earnings.

nemo44x 9y ago

On Hacker News we are enthusiastic about Snapchat as a technology without any value in terms of being technologically interesting or useful. But yet we are littered with blockchain skeptics.