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Reddit's Shares Plummet Almost 25% in Two Days, Dropping Below Its First Day's Close (cnbc.com) 31

Last Monday shares of Reddit's stock soared 30%, reports CNBC — and then another 8.8% on Tuesday.

But the moves happened "even after New Street Research issued a neutral rating on the company" — and by the end of the week, CNBC was reporting that "Reddit shares are plummeting..." Shares closed at $49.32, ending the week below their closing price on Reddit's first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange [on March 21st, when they closed at $50.44 ]... Stock markets are closed on Good Friday.

Reddit shares began their downward spiral on Wednesday, when they sank about 11% to $57.75 at market close. That day, Hedgeye Risk Management described Reddit's stock as "grossly overvalued" in a report cited by Bloomberg News, adding the company was on the firm's "short bench."

The article notes Reddit's CEO sold 500,000 shares in the company — nearly 40% of his holdings — which Ben Silverman, vice president of research at Verity, told CNBC was expected — while Reddit's COO sold another 514,000 shares.

"There's always a bit of a disconnect," Silverman said in the interview, because bringing a company public "is not just to generate liquidity for the company itself so that it can expand and grow. In these situations, it often allows insiders to cash out to generate liquidity.

"And that's something investors have to consider here. If the prospects are so bright, why are insiders selling?"

Reddit's Shares Plummet Almost 25% in Two Days, Dropping Below Its First Day's Close

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  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday March 31, 2024 @06:17PM (#64359532)

    Good for them.

    • Now they should sell NFTs commemorating the, ah, "lost" money.

    • Not as a social media company but as something you can train chat box on. It just comes down to what happens in the courts. If the courts rule that scraping websites for data to train AI chatbots is illegal reddit suddenly becomes a lot more valuable. It's a Court's rule that doing so is covered by fair use then yeah what it loses most of its value.

      I think it's a little early to tell one way or the other but then again insider information is a thing so this could be a sign that somebody knows how some
      • Reddit is for karma whoring and shitposting in the various "jerk" subs. You can't really have a genuine discussion in the serious subs, because the moment you put one toe over the groupthink line, your karma ignites like a stormwater flooded Tesla.

        Seriously. I got banned from /r/politics for relating a story of how I've been called a "faggot" for, get this, ambiguous use of hate speech. When an actual gay man isn't allowed to describe the sort of homophobia he's experienced, you know that forum has jumpe

        • Karma? Nah they'll nuke the whole account these days if they get the slightest hint you may be committing wrongthink.
        • /r/politics isn't for discussing politics, it's for gathering everyone who can be influenced in one place under the false impression it's for discussion, and then creating a false sense of consensus by vigorously censoring whatever the mods don't want you to be exposed to.

          In other words, it's a propaganda op. Whether it's run by well-intentioned nuts or part of a paid social media influencing campaign I don't know, but in terms of the end result from a poster's perspective there is no difference.

      • Being a thriving social media company is what would make it worthy to train on though. It can't just rely on selling the same archive from when it was relevant.
      • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        As a social media company, Reddit's value in training AI models is limited to that where engagement is valued above truth.

        But I wish them luck anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      why are insiders selling?

      Because that's the whole point of the scam. CEO and COO each sell shares and each walks away with $25 million. At that point it doesn't matter if the stock tanks or the company goes out of business. A few insiders collected their millions and that is all that matters.

    • Reddits bagholders are nothing compared to the Truth Social bagholders. I expect RDDT to retain some value but I think DJT was worth something like $20,000 per actual truth social user at some point this week. A lot of people will lose a lot of money I'd be willing to bet.

    • I find Reddit's tech channels to be surprisingly good, so it does have value. I don't know if the value coincides with its share price, though.

      I was thinking about all the tech companies I didn't invest in because I had some personal grudge against them. Most of those companies became highly priced, and I regretted not investing in them early. I was tempted to not miss out on yet another one, but I resisted the urge. Only time will tell whether it was a good decision.

      I can easily see the possibility a large

      • If agree. I find people there generally helpful.
      • If you want to find a human talking about or fixing a problem then reddit is about the only place left. Websites are useless for that now with content designed to get better search results. Some forums might exist but they have a tendency to come and go. They aren’t indexed deeply by Internet Archive and google purged all their cached copies.

    • I preferred the old days of individual separately run forums, rather than Reddit's "flea market" approach. It's especially bad when you join a new sub and people crawl through your post history. I still remember seeing someone asking for help about a turntable on /r/vinyl and he got grilled for the nudes he was posting elsewhere on the site (because you don't ask for turntable advice on /r/vinyl, you're supposed to use /r/turntables, and if you didn't know that, well, too bad, people are going to have fun

  • wording (Score:4, Informative)

    by diesel66 ( 254283 ) on Sunday March 31, 2024 @06:51PM (#64359620)

    "it often allows insiders to cash out to generate liquidity", id est "Take the money and run".

    • Well, darn. My moderator points ran out. Someone mod parent up. '

      That being said, moving founders out (with their proceeds from going public) is often the best thing for a newly public company. People good at startups are not necessarily good at operating (public) companies over the long run. I observed that in the small company I was in. The problem was that the venture capital people who had the plan to cash out (either going public or through a sale) were assholes, and a majority of the employee sh

  • He's never made any money in his entire life. He means well, but he's a bit of a hippy, he doesn't like to work much and he has two left hands.

    One day he bought an old minivan and told us - my sisters and I - that he'd start a small business delivering groceries to old people in remote villages, and would we like to invest in his company.

    Can you guess how much we gave him?

    We love our brother, but we'll never see our money back. Been there, done that. So we passed up this investment opportunity.

    Well guess wh

  • Soulless hissing evil.

  • by SubmergedInTech ( 7710960 ) on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:09PM (#64359804)

    When I worked in tech, I always sold *every* share of stock as soon as I could.

    Not because I didn't believe in the companies I worked for (and some I was with for 14 years).

    But I already depended on the company for my salary, and all my currently-unvested stock. So keeping all my vested stock would have way overconcentrated my investments. I figured if the company did well, my remaining stock would sell better when it vested, and they'd give me more (and they did). If the company did poorly, I'd be glad I sold it when I could.

    It turns out I would have made more money keeping the stock they gave me... but they could have just as well Yahoo'd, and my stock would have bought me a very nice bicycle instead of paying off my mortgage.

  • by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:11PM (#64359808)

    When Reddit and Twitter come up I think those are the two platforms that really exemplify, for better or worse, what a "digital town square" is today, not by design but just how things have ended up. Whatever we think about happens on these sites they are gigantic bastions of human interaction and shared knowledge. These places are "real life" as it were, they should be something cultivated more than squeezed for dollars.

    It makes me think bout the texts Dorsey and Musk shared before he bought Twitter and for all his hippie nonsense I think Jack Dorsey is 100% right about this. For a second I thought maybe Musk was enough of an actual altruist to actually do this with Twitter, which would have been a true baller move.

    https://twitter.com/TechEmails... [twitter.com]
    ------


    Jack Dorsey: Yes, a new platform is needed. It can't be a company. This is why | left.

    Elon Musk: Ok

    Elon Musk: What should it look like?

    Jack Dorsey: | believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn't own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can't have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn't complicated work, it just has to be done right so it's resilient to what has happened to twitter.

    Elon Musk: Super interesting idea

  • Owning a piece of a company that depends on advertisers and whoring out user data to 3rd party brokers seems pointless and defeats the open forum discussion that it was built on.
  • ... well, there won't be any profit here for slashdot. Profitability fell to - or below - zero a long time ago and won't likely ever return. Eventually someone will shut out the lights for the last time.

    But of course since Reddit fills in for slashdot for a lot of tech people, here on slashdot we must celebrate when Reddit falters. Because of course bad news for the competition can only be good news for this site, right?

    Yes I know I'll be down modded into oblivion on this one, if anyone with mod

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