To be honest, it's the crashes during these 7% down days. Prevents me from panic selling.

I'm not a professional at money laundering, but under most circumstances, you'd want to do it without attracting attention.

If you clicked the article, you would see that it is in the first few paragraphs in bold: marketing and sales. Pretty much what most growth companies have to spend on in the earlier stages.

AirBnB is well out of their 'earlier stages'.

I did click (and more importantly, read) the article, but found it vague. I was hoping for something that wasn't surface-level, unlike your comment.

Duck Duck Go? Really?

(tongue in cheek)

The point was that large unstoppable incumbents have always been replaced with something nobody expected.

(that said, monsanto and debeers are still around)

IBM is still around. So is Microsoft. So is Google.

IBM is basically on life support milking their consulting business and pretending Watson does stuff it doesn’t to further their consulting business.

IBM was unstoppable, then Microsoft came from nowhere.

Microsoft was unstoppable, then nonexistent Google appeared.

(yeah, microsoft/google/apple have vied for "current top money vaccum")

As a reminder, Microsoft is the largest company in the world and has a 25% larger marketcap than Google.

I find it funny that so many people think Microsoft was "stopped" by Google. They adapted and they are stronger now than in the 90s as a business.

Debeers is on its way out. They may come up with something to stay relevant, but they are getting desperate to come up with ever more sophisticated machines to detect man made diamonds from their mined blood diamonds.

IBM and Microsoft are still around, too. I don’t get your example.

Microsoft not only is still around, it has a 25% higher market cap than Google.

In addition, the spread can potentially get larger and larger with time, increasing the tax that you must pay to exercise.

"Uber uses AI, therefore, you don't pay a fair price."

Do you understand how many other industries use AI for pricing? What about buying things on Amazon? Hotels? Airline tickets? Gas?

You may as well go back to using taxis if you don't think Uber is giving you a fair price.

Wait you are telling me gas stations use an AI algorithm that sets different pricing for each individual because that is what I dislike.

I'm okay with airlines, amazon or whoever setting pricing at whatever they want as long as all users pay the same amount for the same thing.

You challenge that it is stiff competition in your first sentence, then you define that Google is, indeed, stiff competition in your second.

They own the search results. Google isn't a public utility that gets hijacked.

Yelp can start their own search competitor if they enjoy(ed) the synergy.

If things were as simple as this, you could then always short IPOs for a while, and the expected value would be positive.

You can short sell but unfortunately (at least for retail, and to the extent of my knowledge) not trade options in the first week of trading for a newly listed stock. Which is a shame because I 100% would have bought puts in the first hours of trading when I saw the market price surge into the 80s. Lyft's float is pretty low volume so the surge of retail investors trying to add Lyft to their portfolios caused a mini bubble.

I'm sure you haven't looked over historical data, but if you did you'd find this to be a profitable strategy were it not for two problems: finding shares to borrow (a requirement to "short" a stock, because you borrow them and immediately sell), and if you try and fix that problem with buying put options, those won't be available for a week.

Actually so far for the last few years at least this strategy was quite profitable. New IPOs significantly underperformed S&P500

Yes, and the expected value is positive. Unfortunately for us, the banks that underwrite the IPO choose who to allocate the shares to, and they would prefer to allocate them to clients that have a history of not dumping the stock and/or lending shares out for shorts.

You'd think that if the EV was positive, that no one would buy the IPO, and would instead but a few days/weeks later. Why buy before the dip?

The entire value of the offering was traded in the first 30 mins which goes against that narrative a bit..

"On premise" makes my ears hurt