Rob Cox’s Brutal Assessment of Snap’s IPO

Rob Cox, writing for Reuters:

Investors have effectively just done what no self-respecting person ever should: wear sweatpants in public. With Snap’s $3.4 billion initial public offering they have simply given up giving a damn. They handed their money over to an immature company and in the process abrogated their rights to fair treatment, good governance and reasonable valuations. If the $24 billion self-styled “camera company” run by a 26-year-old fails to achieve its ambitions, shareholders have only their capitulated selves to blame.

Snap founder Evan Spiegel’s disappearing-message application has many things going for it. One of these attributes — its virtual inaccessibility by anyone over the age of 30 — may have helped its IPO. Few seasoned portfolio managers wagering on the maker of rainbow-vomit photo filters will have properly vetted the product, though they will have perhaps gauged its popularity by monitoring their children’s mobile-data usage.

Tell us what you really think.

★ Thursday, 2 March 2017