Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#181

Post by Cookingboy » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:11 AM UTC

askafriend wrote: post #127

criley2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree entirely. Twitter? No good way to monetize. Groupon? Failed to monetize effectively after virality faded and without a moat competitors did the same thing. Yelp? A web version of the BBB protection scheme whose profit comes from the shake down protection racket against small businesses, not from users. Zynga had no moat and other companies quickly did the same thing with much leaner overhead, like King and a…

If Box was overvalued then Dropbox must just be fucked.

Box is probably a little undervalued since they are trading at only 3x their revenue, despite beating analyst expectation for every quarter since IPO. The rest of the cloud/SAAS sector are trading at about 8x-10x in comparison. Dropbox, on the other hand, is valued at 25-30x their revenue, so entirely different animal altogether.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#182

Post by tyre » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:13 AM UTC

mylons wrote: post #144

tyre wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've seen the argument that X company is in trouble because the baby boomers use the other platform. AirBnb raised $1b last year, projecting 2015 revenues at $900m [0]. Until financials show otherwise, they appear to be doing just fine. [0]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-math-of-airbnbs-24-bi...

$150M a year in losses. Sounds great! My parents generation, which maybe also has something to do with living in the midwest, has been using VRBO and it's affiliates longer than airbnb has existed outside of silicon valley, and are reluctant to change. They're also the property owners right now, relative to the millennials.

$150M is a large number, but so is $1b. At that burn rate they have over six years of runway.

It may be that for every $100M they spend on acquisition, they make $200M over three years in sales, in which case it would make sense to burn cash now to capture the market. They could also be going all LivingSocial: setting money on fire with no path to unicorn profitability.

Anyway, no real way to know without the inside financials.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#183

Post by Naritai » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:17 AM UTC

supster wrote: post #96

amelius wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the flip side, every time someone takes an Uber or rents a room on AirBnb, they pay the company. Yes, but Uber and AirBnB do not have (from a technical perspective) innovative products, nor strong lock-in businessmodels. Everybody could start a competitor. In fact, Uber faces a lot of competition already; see e.g. [1], [2]. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2015/09/09/uber-wants-... [2] http://www.wsj.co…

Their lock-in is their network effects. Airbnb has a huge selection of locations in many major cities around the world. Uber has an incredible number of drivers and riders on the system globally at all times of the day. Competitors will have a very hard time replicating that.

Your comment would be true if it weren't possible to list on multiple sites/apps at the same time. Many studies have already shown that the majority of drivers in large markets (SF/NY/etc) keep multiple apps open, and accept fares from whichever one offers the (probable) best return. While Uber appears to be fighting this by modifying some policies, there's ultimately very little they can do to stop this.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#184

Post by nl » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:18 AM UTC

sly_foxx wrote: post #157

pyrrhotech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll concede that Uber and Airbnb business models are stronger than the others, but they are still massively overvalued based on near future growth prospects. Those two will probably succeed in the long run, but they still won't be good stock picks

Agree. Airbnb's valuation is very close to eBay's. So, that means that it's expected that in the near future AirBnB will generate at least $2-3 billion in net profits per year. Actually, it would have to be more than that, because investors expect even higher valuation on IPO. Peter Thiel stated he thinks AirBnB will be $100+ billion company, which would imply he expects at least $7 billion after tax profits in the n…

AirBNBs revenue is over 1.2B, 340M per quarter. http://skift.com/2015/11/23/airbnb-revenue-now-larger-than-c...

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#185

Post by alexhu11 » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:19 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #176

alexhu11 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just pointed out another barrier to entry for Uber and AirBnB. New entrants will probably have less selection and higher cost. This is fatal in a fundamentally commodity business. There will be no competitor to AirBnB or Uber for the foreseeable future.

Lyft seems to be doing okay, and don't underestimate targeted markets for upstart competition... If you can get most of the BnBs in say Sedona, Prescott and Payson Arizona to use your upstart service, you can grow from there, one targeted market at a time... local presence can be a significant advantage.

The textbook response would be a price war. Raise prices in uncompetitive cities and lower prices in at risk cities. This is one of the tools Standard Oil used to create its monopoly.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#186

Post by alexhu11 » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:25 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #175

alexhu11 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The barriers to entry for any competitors are highly behavioral. Consumers are used to using (and implicitly trusting) AirBnB and Uber. Any new entrants would have to replicate that. This is part of the reason why Jet.com will never beat Amazon.

I remember when Yahoo was a manual index, AltaVista was the best internet search, and Hotmail wasn't a MicroSoft owned company... when most email addresses were truly painful (anyone remember doing internet email via fidonet? compuserve?). Google has now been king for a while, but if someone came out that did things clearly better, people aren't tethered.. even Facebook has its' upstart competition (that they keep bu…

Do users pay for any of those services you mentioned? This changes the dynamic completely by forcing the user to become engaged.

At the core AirBnB and Uber are selling commodities. They appear to be the lowest-cost producer because of their cost structure and scale. The price advantage alone is a high wall to scale.

Could another entrant come and improve the AirBnB or Uber experience 10x? Maybe. I wouldn't bet money on it though.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#187

Post by _rpd » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:28 AM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #137

chris_wot wrote: post #9

The lockup agreement expired. Looks like employees and executives are selling up big time. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/etsy-shares-fall-after-expi...

That's crazy. The employees owners just gutted the value of their own company.

Alternatively, they are informing the market of their perceived value of the company.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#188

Post by gniv » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:30 AM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #3

Angie's List: from $28 in Jul 2013 to $9[0] Box: from $24 in Jan 2015 to $10[1] GoPro: from $87 in Oct 2014 to $11[2] Groupon: from $26 in Nov 2011 to $2.60[3] GrubHub: from $46 in Apr 2015 to $21[4] Twitter: from $70 in Jan 2014 to $18[5] Yelp: from $97 in Mar 2014 to $21[6] Zillow: from $121 in Feb 2015 to $22[7] Zynga: from $15 in Mar 2012 to $2[8] 0: http://www.google.com/finance?q=ANGI 1: http://www.google.com/f…

And Fitbit: from $51 in Aug 2015 to $18

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#189

Post by foobarqux » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:30 AM UTC

mrgordon wrote: post #153

mylons wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

airbnb has a real problem: VRBO. VRBO is routinely cheaper than airbnb, has been around longer, and doesn't have the legal issues, and has the support of the baby boomers. Good luck, airbnb.

VRBO is actually starting to copy Airbnb's pricing model because they're losing. It has worse legal issues in many areas because it is outright short term rentals instead of hosted rentals. Additionally, the response rate and speed is much worse than Airbnb which is all that matters to most baby boomer users. My dad gets frustrated as soon as instant booking isn't available like a hotel room

AirBnB makes most of its money on non-hosted rentals.

Re: Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months

#190

Post by hueving » Sat, Jan 16, 2016, 12:33 AM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #56

tyre wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market cap is just value of a single share * number of shares outstanding. Do you have a better way of valuing a publicly-traded company? When you say "its actual value is probably unchanged", what value are you talking about? If you think there is a disconnect between share price and value (however you're measuring that), then it is an excellent opportunity to arbitrage an inefficient market.

The way I read his comment was a difference between perceived value and actual value. Market share is equivalent to perceived value, not actual value. So the comment was remarking that the drop in share price could be the result of inflated expectations becoming more realistic rather than a loss of actual value of the company. The biggest difference between perceived and actual value that I'm aware of is the tulip ma…

What are you talking about? The value to the people is what they will pay for it. If nobody is buying it at a certain price, then there is nobody that feels it has value at or above that price. There is no 'real value' of something vs its market value.