These numbers were released after the close, but every trader and their brother was buying this morning. Insider trading is rampant on Wall St. This is clearly yesterday's news for the privileged few.
Eh, it's actually because everyone who's shorting GRPN covering their shares prior to the catalyst event. Everybody knew that GRPN's earnings were going to be positive (not positive but that it's going from red ink to earning $0.01/share, ha), so even though this company is POS. For the short-term, you don't want to going against the herd who will be turning around from bashing to mildly praising. When shorts cover, it's a wave that eventually lead to a squeeze which causes more shorts to cover - lifting the price.
Personally, this is a great event. GRPN will go up a little, leaving it more room for the slow bleed later and given that there's also weekly option series. GRPN is a great stock to trade.
>every trader and their brother was buying this morning
I've noticed over the past year that such stock price behavior is particularly acute near market close (which is perhaps when the less-priviledged-of-the-priviledged-few get in on the info.).
So revenues up from $295m to $559m and operating income from -$146mn to $-12mn. Managing to grow revenue while narrowing the gap to black by quite a margin, good on them. I just wish they would quite re-stating the non-GAAP numbers. What value do they have beyond letting the press release have a dubious headline?
Actually most companies and ALL analysts use non-GAAP numbers (search for your favorite company + non-gaap https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...)... it reflects the true nature of the business. They are also referred to as pro-forma numbers. There isn't any funny business going on here. It is good that we have GAAP so you can compare apples to apples in different industries but for a further breakdown non-GAAP numbers are very useful to an analyst.
Yeah but the non-GAAP numbers exclude customer acquisition costs (e.g. marketing). Not sure why that's excluded as marketing is a continuous and fundamental cost of doing business.
No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.
Ok, sorry, I misunderstood. I had lingering memories of the critiques against groupons earlier non-GAAP measures [1][2][3][4][5][6] but the non-GAAP net income mostly seems to exclude stock, acquistion costs are pretty low and very clearly separated from marketing and customer acquisitions. Again, my bad.
What worries me is that Groupon is still just a company that 'happened' to be able to raise enough capital to become the biggest of 100s of businesses all doing the same thing.
Nothing about their business is hard to replicate, nothing is revolutionary, nothing has not been done before.
It seems many investors and analysts see a 'social media shopping experience' while all I see is a flyer in my mailbox 'on the internet'.
What's to stop Groupon from becoming the MySpace of online coupons to a future Facebook in the same sphere?
I'm not sure how big of an advantage it is, but isn't the "Groupon" brand fairly valuable? For a non-user of daily coupon sites like myself, the first site I'm going to visit if my daily-couponing interest is piqued, will be Groupon.
The counterargument of course, is that daily deals sites only attract the bargain hunters who have little to no brand loyalty, so even the "biggest brands in the business" don't have retention power.
Now that I've written this post out, perhaps the latter effect is in fact stronger...
This is somewhat true of Amazon as well, though they later went on innovate with their web services. Early on they just happened to be one of the first and capitalized on their access to cheap capital.
Amazon's distribution and logistical network is a major asset that would cost a ton of money to replicate. This is a major barrier to entry and Amazon's primary competitive advantage in the online retail space. Groupon's main advantage (other than being the first mover) is merely a giant e-mail list of customers and merchants, nothing that a scrappy team can't try to replicate on the cheap.
I don't think Amazon falls into the same bucket. Most of what Amazon does is a bit better than its would-be competition. Whereas what Groupon does is exactly what everyone else would do.
What a lot of people don't realize is that Amazon has amazing logistics and considerable skill in merchandising. Building that logistics footprint is why Amazon has survived and others failed (speaking as someone who worked for an early competitor).
Look at Best Buy and ask yourself, is Amazon really so easy to replicate?
Granted... I still don't think Amazon is worth the crazy multiple that they trade at, but you can't put them in the same class of company as GroupOn.
What GroupOn has is a brand name and a legion of sales people and contacts with local businesses. Unfortunately, GroupOn has a way of doing terrible things to local businesses that can't operate at the scale of something like GroupOn and which lack (in a sadly large number of cases) the simple business math skills to know when a GroupOn deal is no good for them.
So, the two assets GroupOn has (brand and sales/contacts) are both fairly impaired and much more easily replicated than what Amazon has to offer: logistics, infrastructure and algorithmic secret sauce... not to mention brand and customer loyalty.
Does this report in combination with the board members who resigned ~2 weeks ago smell somewhat...fishy...to anyone else? If things were going so well, why did 2 board members bail?
I think Groupon has far more potential than people assume. By being the biggest and having established some integration with local merchants, they could dominate the local space beyond just daily deals.
Unfortunately its not about the desire for the SEC todo their job, its ability.
New top-grads in finance (and highly sought after performers) go to work at large banks simply based on incentive structures. The SEC is out gunned from the get-go.
The bleeding has slowed, but still bleeding. Difficult to gauge whether the patient will survive. That people pour(ed) so much money into this continues to astound me.
I'm surprised by the continued negative drum beating by some. The technocommentariat has had it in for their favorite "big Ponzi scheme" for awile but ... here Groupon is, not going bankrupt like the top comments in every related HN thread for the last year have assured us they shortly would. On the contrary they're doing great.
Ironically I think Popsicles actually reduce their own index! Empty calories and concentrated sugar being given to children probably harms their health in the long run.
Our own data. We collect, cleanse and analyze data from the local commerce industry. Our database contains about 3M deals which represent around $4B in consumer spending. We currently track about 260 deal sites in North America, including Groupon.
Our platform is continually monitoring the industry from a variety of sources. The reporting platform and API runs off a dimensionally modeled DB. The UI is pretty rough at this point, really just a MVP to demonstrate our data and the direction we are headed.
Our platform currently tracks Groupon.com which covers US and Canada. Groupon has 47 technically separate sites to make up their full international business.
