• Gork@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I’ve given up on buying stocks for individual companies. I’d rather just stuff it in an index fund and pretend it doesn’t exist for 10 years.

    • nick@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Me too generally. But on a whim i bought 100 shares of NVDA back in 2019, and god damn has it been good so far.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Most of my etfs are doing better than my stock purchases, but I have had a couple big wins over the years. I’m expecting my reddit put options to be another, though.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      If you have the money to spend/blow, the “correct” approach is to:

      1. Put the vast majority if your money into stable investments. Index funds, bonds, etc. You should have a retirement fund with at least one of the major companies (I have had good experience with Vanguard and Fidelity) and they can help with that. This is for retirement and the like.
      2. Put a VERY small amount into “one off” purchases of various stocks. Stuff like “I think this apple computers might take off some day” kind of purchases. This is not a retirement fund. This is gambling. But it still might mean you have money for a kitchen remodel or a rainy day.

      But if you don’t have money to “throw away”? Do not buy individual stocks. Or crypto. Or anything other than what you need to have a life after you age out of the workforce because late stage capitalism.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s advice I’ve been given many times in my life. If I had any money to invest, that is likely how I would do it.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      the average person usually doesnt beat the average index fund, so if you arent keen at day trading, dont do it.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      So, at some point, Reddit was going to have to be generating a return. Spez or no spez.

      I don’t particularly like the route they took – killing the third-party clients was annoying and I think that there were ways to be a profitable super-forum site and still have third-party clients. But it was gonna be something, and whatever they did – more ads, selling data on users, only providing some functionality to paid users – was gonna be unpopular.

      • Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would have been ok with reasonable prices for API calls. Bandwidth has a cost after all. But they so obviously set out to drive the third party apps out of business so they could sell ads in the official app/website it just disgusted me.

        Also that new mobile site is so shitty, I refuse to believe it’s not on purpose.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          There were some internal docs leaked that made me think their real motivation was that they had signed some contracts for API access and pricing (probably a direct response to AI scraping), and that they were actually contractually obligated to close stuff down and/or set crazy prices. I think it may not have been about apps at all (or very little)

          • prole@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            What do you think API access is? They have 100% control over how much they charge for access. There is no entity above them that they’re signing contracts with to decide pricing. There is no situation where what you just said makes any sense.

        • RatBin@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          What they didn’t see in doing so was that the core content of the site was curated mostly by people who used either old reddit or third party apps. Modding would be unnecessarily annoying without them. The content is, in fact, way worse than it used be, more importantly bots are in the open and with no counter. You can track the amount if reposts. As for mods they can be as toxic as ever, posting on reddit is hard unless you follow small subs or generic ones that let you post whatever. The site itself is the opposite of user friendly: they wanted to be an alternative to all other social media ever…but instagram, tiktok, youtube, even that deranged thing known as x, let you post peacefully amd without too many restrictions. Reddit…forget about it.

        • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I don’t get why they had to drive out 3rd party apps for that? They try to make the ads look like user content so it seems like they could have fed it into the 3rd party apps. It must have something to do with the exact placement of the ads?

          • Sylvartas@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Idk maybe for performance tracking purposes the ads are marked as such and it’s accessible from the API

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Honestly, the things that really pissed me off were

        1. Very little migration time. They pulled the rug out from everyone fairly quickly.
        2. The lying, and Christian’s evidence that proved they were lying.
        3. Not working with developers for a reasonable middle ground.
      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Absolutely. Although, of the 3rd party developers, Christian was probably the biggest thorn in Spez’s ass. Homie’s Apollo developer update posts were legendary and were covered by international press.

        • spiderman@ani.social
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          1 year ago

          yeah he was the one who talked with reddit regarding that issue. idk about the thorn thing though. at the end reddit still runs even after multiple subreddits shutdown. hope reddit’s stocks crash.

  • Veedem@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    He sold about 500,000 shares. He owned, apparently, 3.3% of the 17.06 million total shares of the company, meaning he had a little over 562,000 shares. He sold almost all of his shares. That doesn’t exactly exude confidence in future growth, IMO.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      On the other hand, he already cashed out once and was wrong, so…

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Huffman

      The site’s audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.[11][14][15] Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million.[3][16] Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.[17]

      Huffman spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica[18] before co-creating the travel website Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, an author and software developer, in 2010. Funded by Y Combinator,[19][20] Hipmunk launched in August 2010[21] with Huffman serving as CTO.[22] In 2011, Inc. named Huffman to its 30 under 30 list.[22]

      In 2014, Huffman said that his decision to sell Reddit had been a mistake, and that the site’s growth had exceeded his expectations.[23] On July 10, 2015, Reddit hired Huffman as CEO following the resignation of Ellen Pao[24] and during a particularly difficult time for the company.[25] Upon rejoining the company, Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps, fixing Reddit’s mobile website, and creating A/B testing infrastructure.[3]

      Since returning to Reddit, Huffman instituted a number of technological changes including an updated mobile site and stronger infrastructure, as well as new content guidelines.

      I don’t think that he’s had a whole lot of faith in Reddit as a business since early-on.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps

        Mission accomplished! Those undeniably shitty apps definitely were launched.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          I’ve never used them, but IIRC they acquired some third-party client and then just modified them. “Blue Alien” or something like that?

          googles

          “Alien Blue”, at least for the official iOS app.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue

          I dunno what the history of the Android app is.

          That being said, they’re responsible for what they acquire, just saying that a lot of that might not be developed in-house.

          • poppy@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            They acquired Alien Blue, but what they put out under “Reddit” was not Alien Blue in the least bit. They basically bought it to kill it. I had Alien Blue. :(

              • quicklime@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                My favorite way to visualize the meaning of “asshat”: the person is such a sad waste of human life that their entire upper body is effectively just a hat for their posterior.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Hey, acquiring another app and launching it as your own app is still launching it! What would they have done without spez?

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          Well, you wouldn’t expect it to in the growth phase.

          A lot of consumer-facing Internet companies have a large portion of their costs be fixed costs. That is, a programmer or QA guy costs the same amount whether you have ten users or ten million users. But your revenue is linear in your userbase size. So you really don’t want to be a small company, if you fit that profile.

          The idea is to burn money and grow rapidly to the point where your fixed costs are relatively small. It makes no sense to try to generate profit if you lose growth for it.

          That’s especially true for social media companies, because for them, network effect is a major factor – the value of the network is something like the square of the number of users.

          So you really want to be big, not small.

          So the solution is to grow quickly, lose money during that period, then adjust and monetize the userbase when you can’t afford to burn money growing any more.

          That transition to a profitable state after a money-losing growth state usually means that a company is gonna do something unpopular (since they’re optimizing for something other than appeal) and what Corey Doctorow was complaining about as “enshittification”.

          The fact that Reddit lost money during the growth phase doesn’t mean that it was a failure – that would have been intended, part of the business model.

          Now, if it’s losing money once the growth phase is done, that could be another story.

          • APassenger@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            It’s old enough to vote. Or serve in the US military.

            Or attend college as a non-genius.

            I’m familiar with growth stage. 18 to 19 years seems like a long one. Web 2.0 happened years ago.

      • Null User Object@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        According to the second link, he sold nearly all of his class A shares, but none of his class B shares. His total share of the company went from 3.2% to 2.6%, which, is still not insignificant.

        • laverabe@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          yeah but your statement ‘he sold almost all of his shares’ isn’t really accurate as he really only sold 19% of his shares

          • nyctre@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            19% is still a lot higher than the “only 40mil out of a 16 bil stock” that I’ve seen mentioned and upvoted elsewhere in the thread. But yeah, not that big of a deal, I imagine. I was expecting him to sell over 30%

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s weird, I thought the majority of the $150m or so he got last year was in stock. And this says he barely cleared 1/10th of that with this sale.

      Edit: nevermind, explained in other comments

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I thought they paid him like $200M last year? How does that work out with only half a million shares?

      • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        It doesn’t, he had like 4.6 million shares before the ipo. The 500,000 number sold is just his class A shares. He’ll still have 4.1 million shares of class b stock after this it looks like. The class b stock has ten votes compared to one vote for class a stock for any shareholder votes I believe. So selling only his class a shares won’t change the percent voting control of the company he has by much. The person you’re replying to is confused about how many total shares he has. I don’t think the class b shares are being openly traded though, I think the ipo is just offering class a shares, which is what’s causing the confusion here. He sold almost all of his class a shares, but still has plenty of class b.

        https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024011448/reddit-sx1a2.htm#i1b9a579e78a34dfa99f7f26daeec195b_100

          • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, I mean ipo’s in general are definitely a rich get richer kind of thing that screw over retail traders, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about this one.

  • EndOfLine@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares on Monday at an average $32.30

    On Monday the 25th, Reddit shares were trading between ~$49 and ~$59. The stock has not yet dropped below the initial price of $34.

    Can somebody explain why these shares may have been sold below market value?

    • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s a bunch of trades which happen instantly when you IPO. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I think that when my company went public the pool offered in the IPO included stock from priority shareholders. So I’m guessing he effectively sold them to reddit at slightly below initial offer value for them to release to the public as part of the IPO. This way he doesn’t tank the stock by selling off 500k shares on the stock exchange.

      • thisorthatorwhatever@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        He borrowed money on Reddit’s books. Reddit used that money as part of the IPO. Then he sold his shares, and got his hands on the now clean cash money. Reddit is left with the debt? Is this about right?

      • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        You’re exactly right, he sold off all his class a shares as part of the ipo, though he still retains 4.1 million class b shares that have greater voting rights. You can see who sold shares as part of the ipo with the sec filings:

        https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024011448/reddit-sx1a2.htm#i1b9a579e78a34dfa99f7f26daeec195b_100

        In the table there in the middle you can see how many class a shares were sold as part of the ipo and where they all came from, 500,000 were from huffman. So all the people in the table there sold at the ipo price (or they were new shares created by the company to raise money), they were not sold at the price it was later trading at in the open market. They were already bought by then as part of the ipo. He wouldn’t have been able to do that anyways, I see a lockup period of 180 days listed.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I won’t lie, I do regret not making a quick buck off of it. I could have gotten in at 30-something and out at 40-something easily enough.

    I just couldn’t stomach the thought of buying RDDT. I also guessed Pigboy Spez and his pals would leave us suckers holding the bag.

    Turns out some brave peasants did make money on the IPO. Just not this peasant.

    I suspect the stock will spiral down from here.

    • capital@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Meh. Hindsight and all that.

      People said it about Apple, Amazon, and Bitcoin. Can’t know which ones that will happen with and which won’t.

      • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Same here! I gave them a fake email and didn’t want to do myself to them. Glad you brought that up.

        • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          On the desktop version of reddit you can click through the screen that asks for an email. I never gave reddit my email.

          Had to make a new email for lemmy though.

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I thought about it, and I refused on a moral ground to support reddit. It still may go up, despite everything.

      Rich people don’t usually have morals… That’s the difference between us and them.

    • Jordan117@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There are no guarantees an IPO will pop, even a buzzy one. Uber debuted at the low end of their estimate and trended downward, for ex, and didn’t recover for over a year.

      • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        My instinct was that there would be irrational exuberance for the stupid stock. And ignored it.

        The market is often pure speculation and gambling until the sobriety kicks in.

        Anyway, I missed out on this one because of my caution and contempt for reddit. No point crying over it.

    • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      His 500,000 class a shares were a part of the ipo offering, so they were directly sold with the ipo. He still has 4.1 million class b shares which have greater voting rights than class a shares. So the people in this thread saying he’s sold all of his stock aren’t correct, though he did sell all of his class a shares that are being traded in the public market for the ipo. It’s all in sec filings as part of the ipo. You can see here who sold as part of the ipo and how much, and where all the ipo shares are coming from. Some were created to raise money for the company, others were already existing shares being sold by those who already held shares before the ipo. They wouldn’t be able to sell after the market actually opened, that’s where lockup periods come in, and it’s 180 days in this case. The sale price of these shares was negotiated as part of the ipo before it was trading on the exchange. Now any still held are locked up for that period.

      https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024011448/reddit-sx1a2.htm#i1b9a579e78a34dfa99f7f26daeec195b_100

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They wouldn’t be able to sell after the market actually opened, that’s where lockup periods come in, and it’s 180 days in this case.

        That must be part of the amendments then, because when I looked at the Reddit S-1 about three weeks ago, the lockup for all share classes was at three days, very brief. I looked it up specifically because I wanted to know how soon Spez could get to the dump part of the pump-n-dump, and here we are.

          • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            I’m not an expert, I could be misreading it. The wording isn’t straight forward. This is the section that mentions it:

            In connection with this offering, we and all of our directors and executive officers, the selling stockholders, and certain other record holders that together represent approximately 82% of our outstanding Class A common stock and securities directly or indirectly convertible into or exchangeable or exercisable for our Class A common stock are subject to lock-up agreements with the underwriters agreeing that, subject to certain exceptions, without the prior written consent of Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, on behalf of the underwriters, we and they will not, in accordance with the terms of such agreements during the period ending on the opening of trading on the earlier of (i) the third trading day immediately following our public release of earnings for the quarter ending June 30, 2024 and (ii) 180 days after the date of this prospectus (such period, the “Lock-up Period”): (1)offer, pledge, sell, contract to sell, sell any option or contract to purchase, purchase any option or contract to sell, grant any option, right, or warrant to purchase, lend, make any short sale, or otherwise transfer or dispose of, directly or indirectly, any shares of our Class A common stock and securities directly or indirectly convertible into or exchangeable or exercisable for our Class A common stock; (2)enter into any swap, hedging transaction, or other arrangement that transfers to another, in whole or in part, any of the economic consequences of ownership of our Class A common stock, whether any such transaction described above is to be settled by delivery of our Class A common stock or such other securities, in cash or otherwise; (3)publicly disclose the intention to take any of the actions restricted by clause (1) or (2) above; or (4)make any demand for, or exercise any right with respect to, the registration of any shares of our Class A common stock or any security convertible into or exercisable or exchangeable for our Class A common stock.

            • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, that’s the section, at least for Class A. I think I’m the one who misread, and took “third trading day immediately following our public release of earnings for the quarter ending June 30, 2024” for “third trading day immediately following our public release blah blah blah” (the IPO).

              I need to take more time when I’m sounding out the words, lol. Thank you for looking and taking the time to cite the section.

              • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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                1 year ago

                I’ve read it like ten times and am still a little confused, it is about as confusingly worded as possible I think, haha.