this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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OK so wait until the inevitable hours after opening peak and buy puts?
Sorry, what is a "put"?
It’s a bet that a stock will go down. If you’ve heard people say a hedge fund is “shorting” a stock it means they’re making a bet, a short put, that the stock they are shorting will go down in value in the near term.
For pedantry, because everyone loves it, there's actually a difference between a short sale and a put.
A short sale is when you "borrow" the stock, and sell it at the current price, and then later you buy them back. Instead of "buy low sell high", you "sell high buy low".
A put is when you buy the right to sell something at a given price at a given date.
Both are ways of predicting that the price will go down, along with selling a call, which means you might be obligated to sell at a certain price later.
Shorting gives you cash today, and then you pay interest on the borrowed stock.
Buying a put costs a fixed amount today, and might be profitable later if the cost decreased.
Selling a call yields a fixed amount of money today, and might cost money later.
"Calls" and "puts" are types of contracts about buying/selling stocks (they aren't the stock themselves but are centered around a given stock and its trading price, so they are called "derivatives" as they are "derived" from the stock).
A put is a contract that allows the buyer of the contract to sell stock at an agreed upon price to the seller of the contract, regardless of the current trading price. They are used for a variety of reasons. In one usage, someone who is buying some of the stock at the current trading price may also buy a "put" on the stock at a slightly lower price. This way, they spend a little more money at the time of buying the stock, but if the trading price plummets, they can still sell it at that slightly lower "put" price and not lose too much money.
In this case, the idea would be to buy a "put" (without buying the stock at the same time) when the buyer thinks the stock's trading price is overvalued. Then when the price falls below the "puts" agreed upon value, buy the stock at the lower price and immediately invoke the contract to sell at the "put"s higher price.
Short selling is when you borrow a stock, then sell that stock, then buy it back in time to return it. The idea is that you think it will go down, so you can buy it back at a discount and make a profit.
A put is when you have the option of doing that -- i.e. if it doesn't go down you don't have to do anything with the stock, and you've only lost the fee you paid for the put contract. It's a way of hedging your bets.
A publicly traded stock option contract. Buying a Put allows you to bet on the share price dropping.
To add a little to the risk factor of shorting, your possibilities for losing money are endless. When you buy stock, the most you can lose is the price of the purchase. When you short sell you can lose everything you own and then some. If the price keeps going up, then you keep losing money until you close your position (buying the stock).
How does that work? You buy at $100 a share but if it increases to $200 a share you somehow lose money? That's a strange layer to the stock market. Please explain.
Honestly, I don’t know on this one. It’s tough to guess on internet companies, especially social media.
I think they’re facing pretty strong headwinds that have nothing to do with how we may personally feel about the company. Going off of memory, their valuation was slashed between their first talking about an IPO in 2022 and April-ish of 2023, which is when they started with the push towards monetization and which eventually led to shutting down the API to third party apps. I’m not sure where the $18B falls on that spectrum. I’m also not sure about the underlying metrics, like revenue per user, costs of acquiring new users, and so on. I don’t know if their growth has slowed or accelerated since the API change, but I also don’t think there’s a real competitor at this point (lemmy hasn’t reached critical mass and community fragmentation will probably mean it never will).
On the other hand, I’ve felt since last April or so that the stakeholders are looking to exit. It really feels like spez mismanages the company and is just looking to cash out, take the billion or two and move on to his next thing, after which it will be run by a b-school type who will run it into the ground.
All of which is to say I wouldn’t buy it for my retirement portfolio, but I also wouldn’t short it on opening day. I do suspect they’re underinvested in trust and safety and will run afoul of regulatory bodies, and Reddit is not the household name that Twitter is, so they’ll be easier to ban from markets.