Category Archives: Stocks

by | July 3, 2014 · 1:22 pm

BlaBlaCar raised $100 million in venture funding

 

Don`t drive long distances alone anymore with empty seats. Now, you can share your trip with passengers and best of all, cover your fuel costs. The price per seat and the number of seats you can offer are limited because BlaBlaCar is designed for drivers to offset their driving costs and not to make a profit.

Blablacar

 

Top carpooling routes are London-Manchester £15, Birmingham-Leeds £8 and London-Paris£24. It`s a third of the price of most trains, and much more convenient than buses.

 

The European ride-sharing app BlaBlaCar raised $100 million in venture funding, and that`s on of the largest venture investments in a French startup on record. According to Dow Jones VentureSource, Venture investors put $1,03 billion into French startups in 2013.

 

BlaBlaCar`s $100 million financing is nearly one-tenth of last year`s total. The music-streaming service Deezer I wrote about last week, raised $130 million in 2012. That`s two great French companies.

 

BlaBlaCar is founded in 2006, and their app lets travelers find divers heading where they need to go soon and connects them by mobile or email to arrange to share the ride. The average price for a seat is 16 U.K pounds ($25) or less. The fee partially covers the cost of fuel, tolls and other expenses.

 

The app suggests pricing so passengers and drivers don`t have to spend time haggling. The pricing feature has another purpose: prohibiting drivers from generating profits on the rides they give. This is distinct from apps that let users summon a driver on demand, such as Sidecar, UberX and Lyft, which all promote the idea that everyday drivers can make a living using their platforms.

 

You can rate passengers and drivers and review them like buyers and sellers do on the auction site eBay. Top-reviewed community members who have given or taken a lot of rides tend to draw a faster response when they use the app.

 

Accel is BlaBlaCar`s biggest shareholder, and they said that a startup raising $100 million will be expected to deliver a multibillion exit, and more important was the company`s ability to scale its business globally.

 

So far, they have grown in 11 new countries since 2012, and have about 150 full-time employees today. Most of the is based in Paris. According to their founders, they have increased their total registered users to 8 million from 1,5 million in a few years. 1 million users share rides each month via BlaBlaCar.

 

The service is available in France, Germany, Benelux, Spain, Russia, Portugal, Poland, Ukraine, U.K and Italy. They plan to use its funding to grow its business within the nations where it operates and expand to Turkey, Brazil and India.

 

BlaBlaCar has no plans to expand on the U.S market. Geography and topography make longer distance ridesharing less appealing, so the distance between U.S cities is so great that many travelers have to book a flight to reach their destination in time, Mazzella said.

 

BlaBlaCar`s competitiors is Carpooling.com GmbH in Germany and a younger startup in Ireland, which is Carma, and they are focusing on intracity trips.

 

Reports today:

08:30 a.m EST ECB Press Conference

08:30 a.m EST Non-Farm Employment Change

08:30 a.m EST Trade Balance

08:30 a.m EST Unemployment Claims

08:30 a.m EST Unemployment Rate

08:30 a.m EST Average Hourly Earnings m/m

10:00 a.m EST ISM Non-Manufacturing PMI

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Shiny bull. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Shiny bull nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in precious metal products, commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Shiny bull and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.

 

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by | June 26, 2014 · 12:44 pm

GoPro IPO today

It`s headed for the largest consumer-electronics debut in 23 years today, as GoPro, the video-camera maker is going public. So far, the company has been privately held, but now it is open for the public.

white-edition

The latest consumer-electronics IPO was in 2011. Headphonemaker Skullcandy Inc raised $189 million in their debut. We had another deal in the same sector when another headphone company called Beats ElectronicsLLC agreed to a $3 billion buyout by Apple Inc.

GoPro plans to sell as much as $427 million stocks in the IPO today, and that would mark the largest consumer-electronics IPO since Duracell`s debut in 1991. They raised $433 million at that time, and Procter & GambleCo bought the company six years later.

GoPro will raise $427 million by offering 17,8 million shares (50% insider) at $24, the high-end of the $21 – $24 range. At the IPO price, GoPro will have a fully diluted market cap of $3,5 billion and an enterprise value of $3,3 billion.

GoPro will list on the NASDAQ and their trading symbol will be GPRO. Barclays, City and J.P. Morgan acted as joint bookrunners on the deal, and analysts at the bank expect the deal to value it at about 25 times projected earnings.

If the price of GoPro is $24, the company would have a richer price/earnings ratio than Apple Inc, which trades at about 13 times analysts 2015 profit forecast. Garmin Ltd trades at 20 times.

The bull market in initial public offerings rolls on, and so far in 2014, there have been 144 U.S IPO`s, raising $30 billion. This puts the IPO market on pace for the busiest year since 2000, both by dollar volume and number of deals.

The question mark now is whether the GoPro`s shares are being priced appropriately.

Reports today:
08:30 a.m EST Unemployment Claims
08:30 a.m EST Core PCE Price Index
08:30 a.m EST Personal Spending

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Shiny bull. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Shiny bull nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in precious metal products, commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Shiny bull and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.

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by | June 25, 2014 · 1:50 pm

Will Uber win and Yellow Taxi Car lose?

Uber is probably one of the most attractive companies out there for would be investors. They raised $1,2 billion in funding and are valued at $17 billion. Unfortunately, Uber shares are out of reach for most as the on demand car-sharing app remains a privately held company.

Uber logo

How can investors profit on that? It seems like investors are betting on Uber`s success. Take a look at Medallion Financial Corp, as the short interest has skyrocket from about 400,000 at the end of 2013 to 1,300,000 at the end of last month.

Medallion Financial Corp is a company that specializes in financing loans used to purchase taxi medallions. Uber is trying to make those taxi licenses worthless by creating its own private fleet of drivers and bypassing the medallion system entirely.

Medallion Financial has had a slowly but steadily declining earnings since 2012, and the short interest in their stock has increased by about 245%, and the stock price has been falling 17%, which is a bad sign.

Uber is one of several leading the vanguard of the sharing economy. The sharing economy is also called collaborative consumption. It is the socioeconomic model in which a pool of individuals all benefit from gaining access to physical assets without actually needing to own the underlying assets, which are often prohibitively expensive.

Property rights are still clearly defined in collaborative consumption models. A renter resulting in a more efficient allocation of the asset pool. Up until recently, matching a potential passenger with a driver looking to make a few bucks was nearly impossible logistically on a large-scale. Smartphones apps like Uber and Airbnb have made the process simple by acting as mobile accessible hubs for the efficient allocation of these resource pools.

Medallion Financial Corp may be the most obvious victim of Uber`s rise, but there are other potential losers later down the road as well. If Uber reach their goal with their success as a worldwide phenomenon, the rental car business may suffer as well. Uber is less expensive, and already cheaper than many city-regulated taxis and will become more competitive with car rental costs.

Avis Budget Group is the second largest publicly traded rental car company in the U.S, and the one which acquired car sharing company Zipcar in March this year for about $500 million. Zipcar is similar to Uber in the sense that it enables car-sharing.

The difference is that Zipcar owns its own fleet of cars, while Uber does not. That means much lower costs, and lower risk for Uber. Uber drivers provide their own car to become a driver, which is why Uber has a much cheaper cost structure than the other companies. Uber just takes a small commission for each ride for matching drivers with paying customers.

The largest publicly traded car rental company in the U.S is Hertz, and Enterprise is the largest car rental chain in the country, but it is privately held. Hertz is growing and its revenue is up by over 20% in the past four quarters, but in March they had a dip in the sales growth by 10% and a significant drop in earnings.

For all I know, Uber is planning an IPO anytime soon. We don`t know how fast Uber is growing as the financial information is not publicly available, because they are still a private company, but it seems like investors are placing their bets on Uber as a winner and the traditional yellow taxi cab companies as losers.

Reports today:
08:30 a.m EST Core Durable Goods Orders
08:30 a.m EST Final GDP
08:30 a.m EST Durable Goods Orders
10:30 a.m EST Crude Oil Inventories

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Shiny bull. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Shiny bull nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in precious metal products, commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Shiny bull and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.

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by | June 24, 2014 · 2:11 pm

On-demand streaming music service in the future

 

Amazon Prime Music is an on-demand subscription service similar to the market leader Spotify, Rhapsody, Deezer and the company now owned by Apple; Beats Music. This is only a few among the free music streaming services out there. They all differs from Pandora, which operates a radio-like offering supported by ads. Pandora has the biggest audience, but you can`t pick the precise song you like. You can stream whatever you like on the other one, so long as they has it.

Deezer

Deezer

Deezer is founded by Daniel Marhely in 2006. The first version was called Blogmusik, but they did not have agreements with the record labels, so it was shut down in April 2007. Deezer is a web-based music streaming service.

You can listen to music content from record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group. Deezer is created in Paris, France. They currently has 30 million licensed tracks in its library. In addition; they has over 30,000 radio channels and 16 million monthly active users, and 5 million paid subscribers. The service is available in 182 countries.

Amazon.com Inc is an American international electronic commerce company founded by Jeff Bezos in July 1994. The company name was Cadabra at the beginning, but changed to Amazon.com in 1995, because Bezos thought it sounded too much like cadaver.

1994 is early in the internet era. I can remember I sent my fist mail and chatted for the first time in 1994. It was a very special time, but now many things have changed. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVD`s, VHS`s, CD`s video and MP3 download/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry.

They also produces consumer electronics, notably the Fire Phone, Amazon Kindle e-book reader and the Kindle Fire tablet computer, and is a major provider of cloud computing services. The company continue to grow and are now out with a new product; Prime Music.

amazon-prime_music

Prime Music

Prime Music is a streaming service included in a Prime subscription. Amazon like to say that Prime Music has «unlimited, ad-free streaming» and a catalogue of «over a million songs». So? People using for example Spotify knows that their catalogue have well over 20 million songs. That`s more than twenty times the songs from Prime Music.

If you look at the Billboard Hot 100 list, only one out of ten is on Prime Music. So, nine out of ten is not available via Prime Music streaming. Why should people start to use Prime Music instead of Spotify? I don`t think subscribers to Spotify or Pandora fans will switch to Prime Music and their competitors shouldn`t be too scared of the new competitor.

You are paying for the service, via your subscription fee, which is $99, plus all of those purchases you`re making at Amazon. But it still sorta feels free. The «free» two-day shipping isn`t really free either. It`s a flat prepaid payment of $99 for a year`s worth of shipping.

Amazon is using a tactic out of the storied cable TV bundle playbook. A package includes 100, 200, or sometimes more than 700 more options. If you pay $99 per month it sounds like a lot. If the customers spend much time on the membership they will probably be tempted into making purchases, and they will feel that a Prime membership is an absolute essential.

YouTube-logo-full_color

Youtube

 

Google-owned Youtube is deleting indie bands music videos over contractual disputes ahead of a streaming music service launch. Youtube is removing videos from independent acts because their labels could not come to an agreement on Youtube`s revamped royalty terms.

The deals with those independent labels have been a sticking point in the development of Youtube`s subscription-based music service, which was originally expected to launch early this year. The reason is that Youtube was trying to strong-arm smaller labels into accepting non-negotiable terms that would offer smaller payouts than their competitors like Spotify and Deezer.

Youtube has reached deals with about 90 percent of the music industry, including the three major U.S labels. Their new on-demand paid streaming service is expected to allow users to more easily organize songs by album and listen to songs via Youtube while using other mobile apps and download songs for offline listening. Youtube will launch a paid service for streaming music over the currently free channel.

They already has music service called Play All Access, with a subscription of $9,99 per month which was launched in May last year. This service allows you to listen to any song, artist or album you like without any ads. In addition; you have the ability to create your own radio station by selection a song, genre of music, artist or album. Videos distributed by Vevo on Youtube will remain as part of the company`s free service.

Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group have signed up for Youtube`s new music streaming service, which is expected to launch in a few week. The price for the service is not released yet.

Who will win this war? The one with the biggest catalogue and the lowest price. People don`t care where they are listening to the music. It will remain the same song on all channels. Some of them can differentiate themselves to create packages like Amazon.

The most important thing is that the artist and producers are making money on it. If not, the music industry will die.

 

Reports today:

08:05 a.m EST FOMC Member Plosser Speaks

09:00 a.m EST S&P/CS Composite-20 HPI y/y

10:00 a.m EST CB Consumer Confidence

10:00 a.m EST New Home Sales

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Shiny bull. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Shiny bull nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in precious metal products, commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Shiny bull and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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by | June 19, 2014 · 2:35 pm

Rolls Royce up 6% on buybacks

 

All the commodities are up today. Silver up +0,92%, Gold +0,76%, Copper +0,23% and Oil (brent) is up +0,31%. Nikkei is also up today, as it advanced +1,62%. ASX 200 is up +1,59%. Europe is in a green territory too. Stoxx 50 is up +1,11%, FTSE 100 is up +0,83%, CAC 40 +0,89% and DAX is up +0,78% to 10,008,17 points right now (13:14:00 CET).

rolls_royce_2-wallpaper-1920x1080

(Picture: Rolls Royce)

The crude oil price have never been so high this year and that`s because the conflict that is going on in Iraq right now. The Iraqi government forces battling Sunni militants for control of the country`s biggest refinery. The rally in Asia and the rest of the global stock market is because of the FOMC meeting yesterday.

The stocks rallied after the U.S Federral Reserve signaled that rising inflation won`t trigger an interest rate rise any time soon. investors liked it and sent the European bourses up sharply today. Asian equities posted strong gains, and S&P 500 rose to another record high yesterday.

The Fed Chair Janet Yellen slashed its 2014 growth forecast but expressed confidence that the economy will continue to recover steadily in the coming years, which could warrant a slightly more aggressive pace of interest rate hikes when they start.

That probably won`t be until the middle of next year, and Fed Char Janet Yellen dismissed the resent rise in inflation to its highest in over a year as «noise». Some people were speculating that the Fed would have to come up with a more hawkish commentary and obviously they have been disappointed.

But there were one loser yesterday after FOMC meeting yesterday; the dollar, which fell against major and emerging market currencies, in tandem with U.S Treasury yields, hitting a five-year low against sterling.

A big winner in the European stock market among the blue-chips was Rolls Roys RR.L. An auto car maker for the luxus market. The stock rose 6% after it announced a one billion pound ($1,69 billion) share buyback.

 

Reports today:

08:30 a.m EST Unemployment Claims

10:00 a.m EST Philly Fed Manufacturing Index

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Shiny bull. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Shiny bull nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in precious metal products, commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Shiny bull and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.

 

 

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