SNAP has left millennial investors underwater | Hacker News Reader

SNAP has left millennial investors underwater

nypost.com

12 pointsabeaclark11 comments

Anyone buying Snap shares is Not an investor, but a speculator.

No profits. Significant losses. Net asset value negative. Shares have no voting component. No dividends for the forseeable future.

What a joke. Anyone that gave up their money for this worse than zero stock should consider themselves lucky for not having lost all of their money.

A good reminder: Never ever ever buy a stock because you think the product is cool, or because you use it and like it. That's a bad reason. Honestly I would say just never buy an individual stock and stick with index funds.

Who decides what goes in the index funds?

The people who write the indices. Some are flakey and narrow, like the various Dow indices, now kept around for (dubious) historical comparisons and as headline fodder.

Some are broader and so slightly less dubious (S&P 500), or the larger n of the Wilshire 5000. Some aim for a different kind of breadth (e.g. MSCI).

All suffer from various epistemological problems (inclusion is largely on various market characteristics, e.g. mkt cap, volatility, etc), not to mention management challenges: e.g. ones like the dow are notoriously subject to weighting problems, not to mention splits; companies can change sector or of course merge or go out of business. So do you rebalance your index or not and by what criteria?

So you can pick what ever index floats your boat. Typically people pick very broad ones in the hope of an upward slope with minimal volatility. Black-Sholes would say that volatility is your friend but it hardly is for any normal investor.

Not sure why this basically factual comment would be downvoted.

The general idea is that you just want to have diverse companies whose profits and losses are uncorrelated. Since the market in general goes up you won't be hurt if say, Apple takes a nosedive because your small investment in Boeing makes up for it. A common approach is an S&P 500 index fund which invests in the 500 largest U.S Companies in the stock market. I wouldn't actually recommend only investing in index funds though, personally my retirement investment is a mixture of large capital index funds, small capital index funds, foreign index funds, and U.S Bonds. Talk to a financial planner (preferably a Certified Financial Planner IMO but I'm biased since I have a relative who is one) and make sure they have a fiduciary duty to you.

It's irresponsible of the article to imply that the fault is with $SNAP here.

I suppose "people with no finance experience lose money buying stocks they saw on the news" makes for a less interesting headline.

The stock is still above IPO price. This isn't exactly a Groupon or Webvan kind of meltdown... so far.

First taste of a stock failure. It happens. I've never lost a crazy amount, but I have invested in stocks, only to see them crash and -- either later have more success or remain a complete failure. Live and learn. Best to just study the history of the stock and its value for society as a whole.

Not saying that it has absolutely ZERO value, but I definitely would've loved to see SNAP a bit more successful, and they probably did not know what it meant to become an IPO.

How is it a failure? Seems to have done the job it was set out to do: make the original owners wealthy, make bankers more rich. Still above/near the horrendous IPO price.

Seems like great success.

LOL.. it totally was a success to them :)

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