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Comment by AchieveLife | Hacker News Reader

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My opinion: The bubble expands.

I think the bubble is ending. They want to convert their phantasy money into cold hard cash from retail investors (aka "suckers") before it's too late.

My thoughts as well. It is now or never.

Or they ran out of any other options to raise capital and they are desperate. Another sign the bubble is ending.

The interesting thing about the rush is that they're already too late. They're going to have to accept mediocre exits (versus prior expectations), or abandon their IPO plans.

The growing weakness in the IPO markets can be seen eg in the recent Softbank IPO. Globally synchronous growth has become a globally synchronous melt (from housing in Australia & Canada, to EU growth forecasts, to China, and US forecasts eg FedEx today, to commodity markets). Junk stocks like Blue Apron have already burned to the ground. GrubHub has been chopped in half. Facebook is already sporting a value stock-like ~16 forward PE (imagine what it might fetch in a recession, 12 times earnings?).

There are dozens of prominent, younger tech stocks that face a very painful valuation reckoning soon. What are Spotify, Workday, Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow, Twitter, et al worth if you drain all the froth from the market? Is Shopify's billion in sales really worth a $15b market cap, or more like $5b? Is PayPal's modest growth really worth ~50 times earnings, or half that? Trillions in paper wealth are about to be vaporized and all it took was 2.x% interest rates. Welcome to Japan, where rates can never again be allowed to rise because of the debt load (both corporate and fed govt), and the stuck-in-the-mud debt model guarantees perpetually slow growth as the debt eats away at your capital available for productive purposes (just 1/4 annually of our public debt interest cost now would repair all of our infrastructure over a decade, instead we're stuck forever paying for the wildly irresponsible spending from the last ~14 years; 25-50 years from now, that debt will all still be sitting there eating the budget, and or American wealth via currency debasement to paper over it gradually).

This is spot on. As Warren Buffet said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

Why not raise rates, cause the crash and move on? Sounds like a good solution.

And that public debt interest doesn't even include unfunded defined benefit pension and OPEB (other post employment benefits, e.g. retiree healthcare). I would expect more toll roads, higher taxes, less services, and means testing for social security and medicare.

"They're going to have to accept mediocre exits (versus prior expectations), or abandon their IPO plans."

Mediocre is relative. With a lot of unicorn valuations if they even get "only" 20% they will still have made a lot of money.

Retail investors aren't the primary buyers of IPO stocks, are they? Isn't much of that inventory pre-sold on the road show?

This is pretty much it, a desperate attempt to leave the bag with the public before these companies that aren't profitable run out of money during a bear market.

Surely, and I think it will be dramatic to the top 4 + Facebook.

You can say that AAPL is slipping because this years model doesn't look different or whatever, but what about the others? They are hard crashing.

(There were two trillion dollar companies but now there's no company above 800 billion)

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