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TWTR

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Re: TWTR

#311

Post by fit2rule »

silverbax88 wrote: post #212
fit2rule wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A next-generation media company that has millions of people in its database that can be communicated to, almost instantly about any subject you desire.

That only matters if you can get a payoff when you communicate with them. As of now, Twitter advertising is very ineffective at gathering paying customers. I'm not saying there's no way it can work, and I think they can be profitable, but it's got a long way to go.

A lot of money has been made by those savvy enough to know how to use Twitter to promote a campaign. I think thats worth quite a lot in itself, and if anyone is geared to understand how these campaigns work, its the people at Twitter with access to all the statistics ..

Re: TWTR

#312

Post by davidw »

nikcub wrote: post #31
davidw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone who knows about these things explain why no one else does auctions like Google did? I mean, these guys are supposed to be about markets, right, so why the heck is the price decided by some kind of "central committee"?!

Google's auction didn't work, they marginalized wall st. and the banks ended up rigging the bidding. While it only popped 20% on opening day, the stock was up 4x in a matter of months.

When you say "didn't work", what do you mean? "Rigging the bidding" sounds like a big deal - where is this covered?

Re: TWTR

#313

Post by sz4kerto »

Tossrock wrote: post #222
silverbax88 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is valid, but past performance is not indicative of future performance. Just because Twitter went from $0 to $168M (which is chump change on the NYSE), that does not mean they will continue on that curve or that there's proof that they haven't already tapped their market.

Under Bayesian inference, past performance is the ONLY indicator of future performance...

Not at all on the stockmarket.

Re: TWTR

#314

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

generj wrote: post #40
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Markets are highly irrational. That depends which recent Nobel Memorial Prize winner you believe.

In this world of quant-bots, I don't know how anyone can argue that we have a fully rational market. My understanding is that much of the progress in economics has been merging economics with psychology to identify rational failures.

I believe the argument (massively simplified) goes that if the market were truly irrational someone would be able to reliably beat it and there's not much evidence that that has happened.

Re: TWTR

#315

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

lowboy wrote: post #269
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why you think that IPOs are scams that don't actually create wealth? Or is it just this one? Though I'd rather say that an IPO serves to acknowledge the worth already created by the company before the IPO?

I think bolder88 has a problem with the idea that an IPO creates intrinsic wealth, or somehow increases the overall "wealth" of the entire system (either global or within a given country). Yup, and now the word "wealth" is just a random series of letters when I read it.

As far as I can work out, the IPO does not "create intrinsic wealth", the value is generated by having a successful startup, and this value is then recognised by the market at the IPO - If there was no success in the company already, there would be no wealth at the IPO. But this could be a semantic difference between "creates" and "recognised".

Re: TWTR

#316

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

jcalvinowens wrote: post #301
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quant bots make the market better by increasing liquidity.

I've always thought that's a sketchy claim. The market would have sufficient liquidity without the bots. More importantly, they're a huge waste of resources that produces nothing of economic value.

There's no such thing as sufficient liquidity.

Re: TWTR

#317

Post by troels »

giarc wrote: post #248
ceejayoz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorting is selling a stock you don't own. You have to purchase it back (called "covering") later. If it goes down, you keep the difference between what you sold it for and what you had to repurchase it at. If the price goes up, though, you still have to buy it back. As a share's price technically has no upper limit, you could wind up in the situation where you sold a share for $10, intended to purchase it back at so…

Do you have/Do you get to set limits on it? For example, automatically buy back if it reaches $15?

You could always place a purchase order to execute if the stock rises to $15.

Re: TWTR

#318

Post by seabee »

encoderer wrote: post #281
YZF wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your expectations are of this web site but as far as I can tell we're a bunch of people with different opinions. :-) To me an IPO is very much a conflict of interest situation with asymmetry of information. There are laws to govern this but there is a huge gray area. Once a company is public it's a little different... In my opinion capital markets have been getting more broken in many ways and have…

It's not your specific opinion here that amuses me, but that there is certainly an anti-twitter-ipo vibe here. Across several stories. I've been a regular here for 5 years or so and I've seen many IPOs come and go and few have been treated with this level of derision. You're obviously entitled to your own opinion, and certainly IPOs carry much risk. That "insiders" get made liquid is not, IMO, one of them. Somebody w…

If it is not the job of the capital markets to facilitate economic growth then what are they there for?

Re: TWTR

#319

Post by nhaehnle »

joslin01 wrote: post #261
nerfhammer wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QE myths: http://business.time.com/2013/09/18/taper-tantrums-3-myths-a...

Alright, since you can't speak for yourself or rebuttal with anything more meaningful than "This is nonsense.", I'll respond to the article. 1.) Quantitative Easing is printing money -- "This is because when the Fed buys bonds from banks it does so by crediting those banks’ accounts at the Fed with reserves that didn’t exist before. But it’s misleading to call this process “money printing” because it doesn’t actually…

It's a common misconception, but QE does not change the ability of private banks to make loans in any way. If you think I am wrong about this, please explain the mechanism by which you think QE increases the ability of private banks to make loans.

In fact, there are almost no serious arguments for why QE should stimulate the economy in any way, except for a small straw, which is that QE might reduce long-term interest rates, and that this drop of long-term interest might induce more people to take out bank loans and increase their spending in this way.

Also, yes, Quantitative Easing might lead to inflation, but this is exactly what people hope for in the first place :-)

And no, Quantitative Easing will not lead to uncontrollable inflation. If loan-driven inflation gets too high, the central bank can simply decide to raise interest rates and stop QE again.

Re: TWTR

#320

Post by nhaehnle »

jerf wrote: post #228
clarky07 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if he is, but I would certainly suggest that markets are not efficient. Not even close. Google had a 40 billion dollar swing in valuation in a day last month. Were they really worth 40 billion more that day? Apple lost 300 billion in market cap in a matter of 6 months. Either they weren't worth that much at the peak, or they weren't worth that little at the bottom. There is no way you could ever convince…

You seem to be using a definition of "efficient" that has some sort of moral or intuitive meaning. That's not the relevant definition. It's really something more like "the market will not exhibit large-scale persistent arbitrage opportunities", which is why showing the market is inefficient pretty much by definition requires you to produce a method to consistently make substantial quantities of money by exploiting th…

That's one of the main problems with the efficient market hypothesis, actually.

The EMH is false for values of "efficient" that are interesting, and the values of "efficient" for which it might be true are boring and useless in the grander scheme of things.

A lot of needless bad blood enters discussions because everybody interprets the word "efficient" as they please.

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