Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Interesting on a lot of levels. One is that they quote it as being a 40% premium to when a hedge fund bought a stake supporting a sale, but only a few percent above today's close. This suggests that the market was betting on a sale at around this place. (Compare to Marketo, which sold at well above the market value)

Another interesting piece is that Qlik had a massive drop (~30%) in Q1 revenues versus Q4. [0] Enterprise software sales is seasonal, but this was pretty extreme.

Another interesting piece is their SG&A is very close to their revenue, and dwarfs R&D. This suggests that Sales and Support is what's going to get the big axe.

[0] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AQLIK&fstype=ii&ei=...

As far as the "40% premium" goes:

> This price represents a premium of 40% to the Company’s unaffected 10 day average stock price prior to March 3, 2016 of $21.83

Basically they took at 10-day average around a (somewhat) arbitrary date to price the stock for that 40% number. "Somewhat" because that date was when Eliott Management, an activist investor fund, bought a giant chunk of Qlik. That signaled a likely upcoming acquisition (which, as you said, the market was betting on). Thoma probably argues that signal moved the stock above it's "true" price.

The counterargument would be a defense of the efficient markets hypothesis: that the true price isn't about signals and technicals, it's just what someone is willing to pay.

I would think that Elliott's acquisition was that an acquisition might happen - what surprised me was that the price barely moved after that. Usually there's some kind of bidding war at the end. Or a chance that the acquisition falls through for a while. (Look at how long it took for Yahoo to finally get moving that way) It's rare that the early information hits a bullseye 3 months later.

I can't say their support was great. Their server version seems to be full of security holes, I'm sure there are zero days circulating they don't know about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com