San Francisco is 49.2 square miles of pure innovation – at least historically.
The most creative solutions to the world’s most complex problems have been generated from this diminutive peninsula that juts out into the Pacific Ocean.
But when it comes to transportation, and by that, I mean the public transportation efficiently operated in most European and Asian cities like Seoul, Korea and Frankfurt, Germany, San Francisco epically fails at delivering an adequate system to the masses.
Instead, the stopgap solution gave us Uber (UBER), the rideshare company, and the fall out is more cars clogging up a bigger portion of the roadways and bridges.
And then there is Tesla (TSLA), whose enigmatic CEO loves to tell investors that electric is the panacea to the world’s economy.
Is Silicon Valley that far off from solving the conundrum of smooth public transportation by applying technology?
The solution might be percolating in Wessling, Germany by a company named Lilium who developed the Lilium Jet, an electrically powered commuter aircraft capable of vertical taking off and landing (VTOL) flight.
Moving forward, it’s black and white that the answer is 3D and not 2D.
Lilium was founded in 2015 by four engineers and PhD students at the Technical University of Munich.
In 2017, The Lilium Eagle, an unmanned two-seat proof of concept model, performed its initial flight at the airfield Mindelheim-Mattsies near Munich, Germany.
The successful test led the company to launch the 5-seat Lilium Jet and they hope by 2025, to roll out a full-fledged aerial taxi service.
Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand swears that within five years, a fleet of them could offer a 10-minute trip from Manhattan to Kennedy International Airport for $70.
Expectations that aerial taxis will be a reality in the coming years are quickly skyrocketing.
Companies like Lilium are researching, testing, and laying the groundwork for wider production and hankering for support from government officials.
At least 20 companies have skin in the game, which Morgan Stanley estimates will become a $850 billion market by 2040.
Larry Page, the billionaire co-founder of Google (GOOGL), is financially buttressing Kitty Hawk, a Palo Alto company run by the first engineers on Google’s autonomous car.
Uber is developing an air taxi service, with plans to operate by 2023, but I highly doubt that investors would give the go ahead if the cash burn overwhelms them.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is another tripwire that could knock the 2025 schedule off kilter and their notorious bureaucratic ways do not infuse certainty into the project.
Can Lilium build a platform that is broadly accessible and efficient?
That answer will be unpacked in the next few years.
The aerial vehicle has a carbon fiber body, 36-foot wingspan, and is battery powered, providing a range of 186 miles and a top speed of nearly 190 mph.
Inside the oblong-shaped cabin, posh seats await four passengers and a pilot.
The aircraft can take off and land vertically like a helicopter and is even quieter than a helicopter.
Once scaled out, production costs will run in the several hundred thousand dollars for each aircraft-making profitability realistic.
There will be lower maintenance costs because there are fewer mechanical components, and rides should cost less than Uber.
If rolled out on a mass scale, cityscapes will be revolutionized.
San Francisco and California effectively could bypass proper land public transport and skip straight to aerial vehicles as taxis.
Lilium’s plane has packed 36 smaller engines in its rotating wings that act as thrusters for takeoffs, landings, and subtle movements forward and back. Encasing the engines in the wings reduces friction and noise.
Lilium’s performance is currently unmatched but its secretive nature of the technology means it’s hard to quantify where they are now in the development.
With the funneling of capital to solve global transportation issues, aerial aspects will definitely be intertwined into the solution.
The race is on to capture the first-mover advantage and my bet it will be Lilium.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/air-taxi.png343972Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2019-11-13 04:02:232020-05-11 12:22:16Why Your Next Taxi Ride Could Be By Air
As I stare at my trading screen, Uber (UBER) is down over 10% intraday after a better than horrendous earnings report.
I thought share prices go up if companies beat consensus estimates?
In most cases – yes.
But the market is telling us that they do not believe in Uber’s story.
Just because a company loses $1.2 billion which bettered last quarter’s loss of $5.2 billion doesn’t mean investors will handpick the stock and save it from falling through the cracks.
Parsing through the rest of the earnings report, there is not much to really hang your hat on.
First, Lyft (LYFT), its smaller and more targeted competitor, turned up the pressure on Uber claiming they will become profitable on an adjusted earnings basis at the end of 2021, which is a year ahead of its original projection.
This forced Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to hesitantly explain on a call that Uber’s management “hasn’t finalized planning” but is targeting being profitable for financial year 2021.
The claim is farfetched bordering on disingenuous and forcibly made because growth companies are effectively dead if they say it will take three years or more to become profitable.
The investing climate has changed that quickly thanks to Adam Neumann and the fallout at The We Company.
I would be more inclined to say that if Uber has a string of miraculous years with no adverse regulation against them, then there is a fractional chance they might become profitable by 2021.
Honestly, there was nothing that Uber showed me to make me think that I should consider investing in the company.
Momentum keeps slipping as we head into the day when 1.7 billion shares will become eligible for sale, roughly 90% of the total, and my guess is that investors will cut their losses.
Uber will have to gut many parts of the model to get to profitability and they have started the process by slashing employee costs cutting over 1,000 employees over the last quarter, or 2% of its entire workforce.
They will have to slash another 30% to get numbers on their side.
They might have to kill the parts of the business that aren’t delivering enough like Uber Freight and the autonomous driving unit.
The company still hasn’t found a solution for competing with taxi drivers without subsidizing each ride at a loss.
No matter how you dress it up, if the company can’t create solutions for this fundamental barrier to profits, investors will stay away.
It’s also a good reason for you and your money to stay away no matter how cheap Uber becomes.
It’s easy to envision if the state of California rebuffs the online food delivery firms' desire to put a cap on driver costs, that the stock could drop into the high teens.
Dara Khosrowshahi’s thesis of the scale and brand power working in Uber’s favor is flat out false.
Scale can be technology companies’ friend and savior, but when your company is literally a loss-making chauffeur service with zero competitive advantage, what is great about scaling that?
Sure, Uber is great for consumers especially in cities which have horrid public transport which is most of America.
I get that.
But Uber will either be forced to raise prices because they will pay the drivers more due to California law or because they lose too much money.
Who wants to hold a stock with these two crappy options on the near-term horizon?
If a gunman put a pistol to my head and asked me to invest in one, Lyft is the better option, it’s the lesser of two evils.
Yes, sadly we are at this point with these types of companies.
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2019-11-06 09:02:592020-05-11 12:22:49The Nightmare That is Uber
That’s how long it took for my bearish call on desperate online food delivery company, GrubHub (GRUB) to come to fruition.
I wrote an overly negative report on the company which was published on October 2nd explaining why this company and its terrible unit economics were set for a rude awakening.
I usually don’t revisit the same company within the same month in this newsletter, but when I looked at the price this morning, it took me a few minutes to wrap my head around the 44% daily decline.
I will go one more step now and profusely recommend that nobody in their right mind should currently take any bullish positions on any company reliant on employing the gig economy.
The gig economy has been found out for what it is – an elaborate scheme enriching tech stakeholders while shorting American blue-collar labor.
Instead of proper wages flowing to the Uber driver or in this case the GrubHub driver, management has maneuvered its way through some nifty alternative classifications enabling companies to divert a chunk of capital back into the business model.
If these companies can’t make money with skimping on driver pay, how will they make money when American law mandates them to cover sick leave, paid vacations, health insurance, and overtime pay which could soon be coming?
And on top of the subsidies which add to the overall unit cost, how on earth will they piece together a solution that would satisfy shareholders?
Then mix the unworkable unit economics and fuse it with a boatload of competition and my conclusion is clear - profitability is a pipedream.
Buttressing my claims of unprofitability and market stagnation in a note to shareholders, the company admitted, “supply innovations in online takeout have been played out.”
The pitiful food delivery company slashed fourth-quarter revenue projections to between $315 million and $335 million making a mockery of the $387.3 million consensus.
The house of cards is finally collapsing.
Who is the competition?
There are three fierce contestants in UberEats, DoorDash and PostMates.
And to add even more spice inside the fajita, PostMates has recently shelved a planned 2019 IPO because of “market conditions,” a testament to the poor growth prospects for online food deliveries.
I believe no food delivery stock will ever go public again unless they revalue themselves 65% lower from today’s prices.
Much of the value in these companies is a mirage.
To give GrubHub credit, they didn’t put up Chinese walls in their guidance and mentioned that competition is wreaking havoc detailing that their customers are not “extremely loyal.”
They should expect investors to not be extremely loyal either.
Existing customers are now price-shopping by surfing around different apps to take advantage of price promotions proving my point that these gig economy companies contribute minimal incremental value to the end user.
Their secret sauces are hardly secret.
These apps are commodities and yes, there is value in their proprietary algorithms, but by no means are the barriers of entry so colossal that it would take North Korean engineers 10 years to reverse-engineer these same algos.
And with wielding low-grade tech and resigned to “low double-digit” growth, the bullish case behind this stock and the industry as a whole becomes almost laughable.
Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight!
If Uber can perform miracles and reach $40 or if Lyft can snake its way up to $55, these would be the perfect entry points to scale into these cash burn disasters from the short side.
That is my takeaway from an analyst cutting the valuation estimate by 40% for Alphabet’s autonomous car subsidiary Waymo from $175 billion to $105 billion.
At $175 billion, investors were giving Waymo the benefit of the doubt plus a generous serving of hyperbole when this unproven technology has never in the history of mankind been monetized successfully before.
Well, $105 billion is a stretch in current times and that valuation might need to be revisited a few months down the line as well.
In a stock market that has frowned upon the waterfall of cheap money of late to fuel its absurd risk/reward strategies, Waymo’s haircut falls in line echoes the same parallels.
This current market climate is more about bulletproof balance sheets and the Waymos, Ubers and Lyfts of the world are getting a nice bench seat in the penalty box.
Today marked an even lower nadir with Uber Technologies Inc. announcing that it is on the verge of acquiring a majority stake in online grocer Cornershop, a deal designed to both extend its geographic reach and boost profits by commingling food delivery with rides.
Cornershop is a digital grocer in Santiago, Chile.
Yes, Chile, the country in South America.
It’s hard to believe that Uber must reach that far down the olive branch to grow.
Prepare yourself for anything like pig farms in Zimbabwe or plumbing businesses in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Who really knows anymore!
These types of exotic purchases are exactly what Mr. Market despises in a climate of negative tech earnings growth.
But I do believe Uber is at the point where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi must become the unlikely savior as the alarm bells are ringing with current Uber investors presiding over a calamitous decline in shares since the IPO.
It’s a rough one and tough sledding for tech executives in 2019.
And it’s no surprise why the number of fired tech CEOs has mushroomed from the CEO of eBay Devin Wenig to the fake tech CEO of office-sharing company WeWork Adam Neuman who spectacularly lost $3.5 billion of personal wealth in less than 30 days.
He is still left with $600 million but his story epitomizes the tech climate right now and there are no free lunches.
So is Waymo ready to deliver or is it a charade?
Waymo pinged an email to customers of its ride-hailing app that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel.
The email, entitled “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way,” was sent to riders in Phoenix.
A geofenced area that covers several suburbs, including Chandler and Tempe, have a human safety driver behind the wheel and the grid-like setup makes it easy for self-driving technology to perform well.
Waymo has dabbled in Chandler, Ariz. in 2016 and has slowly built this program toward commercial deployment.
Recently, Waymo opened its second technical service center in the Phoenix area to serve a doubling of the fleet.
The general public has never gotten a taste of this technology and I bet it will be years before Waymo is ready and not the late 2019 and early 2020 projection they promised us a few years ago.
There are too many known unknowns that have yet to be solved such as what limitations Waymo will place on these rides.
Waymo is effective in controlled environments but thrown in the natural elements, nighttime, and unforeseen circumstances and the effectiveness deteriorates by orders of a magnitude.
I believe the hurdles relating to the commercialization and advancement of autonomous driving technology will keep slowing Waymo’s march towards success.
Analysts have underestimated how long safety drivers will accompany cars with the most likely outcome a broad-based delay of the rollout of autonomous ridesharing services.
Profitability has been vastly miscalculated as well.
Each driverless car unit is more expensive than first thought and will stay operationally loss-making for years longer.
The technology isn’t advancing at the rate it was when this technology was incubated, Waymo has clearly plateaued and there is a bottleneck in terms of meaningful solutions.
Alphabet has already invested deeply into driverless cars.
Not only them, but Uber already had spent over $1 billion on autonomous cars at the time they went public.
I won’t say this is a black hole of investment capital, but the losses will keep mounting for the next few years and there is no inflection point in sight.
Waymo will continue to be a drag on Alphabet’s earnings after there were such high hopes for the rapid deployment of self-driving cars.
There is a light at the end of a dark tunnel, but that light seems further away than ever.
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2019-10-14 04:02:252020-05-11 13:26:20What is Autonomous Driving Really Worth
That is what the tech market has been telling us and that is why I am slapping a conviction sell rating on the struggling online food delivery company GrubHub (GRUB).
The gig economy has been found out and the industry is about to have their free lunch taken away.
Many tech companies handling cheap labor by employing key workers as independent contractors are about to lose their shirt.
Considering that GrubHub cannot make the unit economics work in their favor when times are good, what do you think will happen if they have to start paying overtime, healthcare, and bonuses to full-time drivers?
Unfortunately for GrubHub, you cannot just strip out the driver in the business model, someone needs to get the hot tacos from point A to point B and back.
Along with higher labor costs, delivery fees are on the verge of cratering because of elevated competition.
GrubHub doesn’t have a monopoly in this industry and restaurants continue to complain that the likes of Postmates, DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber (UBER) Eats rip them off leaving the restaurants with their necks just above water.
GrubHub is so pitiful that they have had to resort to nefarious tactics condemning a failing business model.
Investors should aggressively short the stock or avoid it at all costs.
What type of tricks has GrubHub been up to?
If you hadn’t heard already, Senator Chuck Schumer was in contact with the CEO of GrubHub Matt Maloney over fraudulent fees the food-delivery giant has been charging restaurants nationwide and demands full refunds for cheated customers.
GrubHub was charging restaurants fees for phone calls that didn’t result in food orders and the company admitted wrongdoing.
The company responded by offering only 60 days’ worth of refunds even though this dark practice had taken place for years.
The exploitation took place because of in-house algorithms that calculate fees, which restaurants say can range between $5 and $9 for a single phone call.
GrubHub recently refunded one New York City restaurant vendor over $10,000 for the fraud, covering fees going back to 2014.
GrubHub agreed to extend the refund to 120 days of ill-gotten fees, but many regulators have said this is still not enough.
Then if you didn’t think that was bad, GrubHub had its hand in anti-competitive tactics that sum up the plight of the company.
GrubHub has been creating fake websites, impersonating third party restaurants by undercutting them to take control over their own web sites then taking a larger cut of commissions.
The company says that the fake websites are “a service” for clients, but when the cybersquatting has been to the detriment to the restaurant, using this point of leverage to swindle restaurants out of more fees and sometimes charging them more than 400% of the actual cost.
This insane move has strained relations and murdered trust between GrubHub and outside vendors while making it extraordinarily difficult to take back control over their website.
As you would expect, GrubHub is monetarily incentivized to control the thoroughfare.
A GrubHub spokesman commented saying there would be “no changing of our algorithm” but from how I see it, the writing is on the wall, the equity in the company is in a vicious spiral downward.
It’s hard to make money in restaurants but GrubHub is overreaching big time.
Invest in this company at your peril and avoid all online food delivery platforms, they are simply ghastly investments.
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2019-10-02 07:02:242020-05-11 13:25:44It's Time's Up for GrubHub
Below please find subscribers’ Q&A for the Mad Hedge Fund Trader September 4Global Strategy Webinar broadcast from Silicon Valley with my guest and co-host Bill Davis of the Mad Day Trader. Keep those questions coming!
Q: If Trump figures out the trade war will lose him the election; will he stop it?
A: Yes, and that is a risk that hovers over all short positions in the market at all times these days because stocks will soar (INDU) when the trade war ends. We now have 18 months of share appreciation that has been frustrated or deferred by the dispute with China. The problem is that the US economy is already sliding into recession and it may already be too late to turn it around.
Q: Do you see the British pound (FXB) dropping more on the Brexit turmoil? Do you think the UK will stay in the EU?
A: If the UK ends Brexit through an election, then the pound should recover from $1.19 all the way back up to $1.65 where it was before Brexit happened four years ago. If that does happen, it will be one of the biggest trades of the year anywhere in the world, going long the British pound. This is how I always anticipated it would end. I was in England for the Brexit vote and I was convinced that if they held the election the next day, it would have lost. The only reason it won was because nobody thought it would— a lot like our own 2016 election. That brings Britain back into the EEC, saves Europe, and has a positive impact on markets globally. So, this is a big deal. Not to do so would be economic suicide for Britain, and I think wiser heads will prevail.
Q: Do you think it’s a good idea for Saudi ARAMCO to go public in Japan as reports suggest?
A: When the Arabs want to get out of the oil business (USO), (XLE), you want to also. That’s what the sale of ARAMCO is all about. They’re going to get a $1 trillion or more valuation, raising $100 billion in cash. And guess who the biggest investors in alternative energy in California are? It’s Saudi Arabia. They see no future in oil, nor should you. This is why we’ve been negative on the sector all year. By the way, bankruptcies by frackers in the U.S. are at an all-time high, another indicator that low oil prices can’t be tolerated by the US industry for long.
Q: Is it time to buy the ProShares Ultra Short 20 year Plus Treasury Bond Fund (TBT)?
A: No, not yet; I think we’re going to break 1.33% — the all-time low yield for the (TLT) will probably be somewhere just below 1.00%. We probably won’t go to absolute zero because we still have a growing economy. The countries that already have negative interest rates have shrinking economies or are already in recession, like Germany or Great Britain can justify zero rates.
Q: Are you going to run all your existing positions into expiration?
A: I’m going to try to—it’s only 12 days to expiration, and we get to keep the full profit if we do. As long as the market is dead in the middle here, there are no other positions to put on, no extreme low to buy into or extreme high to sell into. It’s a question of letting this sort of nowhere-trend play out, but also there's nothing else to buy, so there is no need to raise cash. So, we’re 60% invested now and we’re going to try running as many of those into expiration as we can. Looks like all the long technology positions are safe (FB), (AMZN), (MSFT), (DIS). The only thing we’re pressing here are the shorts in Walmart (WMT) and Russell 2000 (IWM).
Q: Do you think it’s a good idea for Tesla (TSLA) to build another Gigafactory in Shanghai, China during a trade war? Will this blow up in Elon’s face?
A: I don’t think so because the Chinese are desperate for the Tesla technology and they just gave Tesla an exemption on import duties on all parts that need to go there to build the cars. So, that’s a very positive development for Tesla and I believe the stock is up about $10 since that news came out.
Q: Will Roku (ROKU) ever pull back? Would you buy it up here?
A: No, we recommended this thing last year at $40; it’s now up to $165, and up here it’s just wildly overbought, in chase territory. Of course, the reason that’s happening is that the big concern last year was Amazon wiping out Roku, yet they ultimately ended up partnering with Roku, and that’s worth about a 400% gain in the stock. You know the second you get into this, it’s over. There are just too many better fish to fry in the technology area.
Q: What happens if our existing Russell 2000 (IWM) September 2019 $153-$156 in-the-money vertical BEAR PUT spread Russell 2000 position closes between $156 and $153?
A: You lose money. You will get the Russell 2000 shares put to you, or sold to you at $153.00, which means you now own them, and you’ll get a big margin call from your broker for owning the extra shares. If ever it looks like we’re getting close to the strike price going into expiration, I come out precisely because of that risk. You don’t want random chance dictating whether you’re going to make money in your position or not going into expiration. If you’re worried about that, I would get out now and you can still come out with a nice profit. Or, you can always wait for another down day tomorrow.
Q: Is it time to get super aggressive shorting Lyft (LYFT) or Uber (UBER) when they openly admit that they won’t make a profit anytime in the near future?
A: The time to short Uber (UBER) and Lyft was at the IPO when the shares became available to sell. Down here I don’t really want to do very much. It’s late in the game and Uber’s down about one third from its IPO price. We begged people to stay away from this. It’s another example where they waited for the company to go ex-growth before it went public, but it didn’t leave anything for the public. It was a very badly mishandled IPO—it’s now at $31 against a $45 IPO price and was at a new all-time low just 2 days ago. You knew when they offered the drivers shares, the thing was in trouble. Sometime this will be a buy, but not yet. Go take a long nap first.
Q: Is the fact that rich people are hoarding cash a good indicator that a recession is approaching?
A: Yes, absolutely. Bonds yielding 1.45% is also an indication that the wealthy are hoarding cash from other investment and parking it in US treasury bonds. I went to the Pebble Beach Concourse d’ Elegance vintage car show a few weeks ago and all of the $10 million plus cars didn’t sell, only those priced below $100,000. That is always a good indicator that the wealthy are bailing ahead of a recession. If you can’t get a premium price for your vintage Ferrari, trouble is coming.
Q: Argentina just implemented currency controls; is this the start of a rolling currency crisis among emerging nations?
A: No, I believe the problems are unique to Argentina. They’ve adopted what is known as Modern Momentary Theory—i.e. borrowing and printing money like crazy. Unfortunately, this is unsustainable and results in a devalued currency, general instability, and the eventual hanging of their leaders from the nearest lamppost. This is exactly the same monetary policy that the Trump administration has been pursuing since he came into office. Eventually, it will lead to tears, ours, not his.
Q: Is the new all-electric Porsche Taycan a threat to Tesla?
A: No, it’s not. Their cheapest car is $150,000 and it gets one third less range than Tesla does. It’s really aimed at Porsche fanatics, and I doubt they will get outside their core market. In the meantime, Tesla has taken over the middle part of the electric market with the Model 3 at $37,000 a car. That’s where the money is, and Porsche will never get there.
Q: How will the US pull out of recession if the interest rates are at or below zero?
A: It won’t—that’s what a lot of economists are concerned about these days. With interest rates below zero, the Fed has lost its primary means to stimulate the economy. The only thing left to do is use creative means like feeding the economy with currency, which Europe has been doing for 10 years, and Japan for 30, with no results. That’s another reason to not allow rates to get back to zero—so we have tools to use when we go into a recession 12-24 months from now.
Q: What’s the best way to buy silver?
A: The ETF iShares Silver Trust (SLV) and, if you want to be aggressive, the silver miners with the Global X Silver Miners ETF (SIL).
Q: Have global central banks ruined the western economic system as we know it for future generations?
A: They may have—mostly by printing too much money in the last 10 years in order to get us out of recession. This hasn’t really worked for Europe or Japan, mind you, though who knows how much worse off they would be if they hadn’t. What it did do here is head off a Great Depression. If we go back to money printing in a big way, however, and it doesn’t work, we will not have prevented a Great Depression so much as pushed it back 10 or 15 years. That’s the great debate ongoing among economists, and it will eventually be settled by the marketplace.
Lyft (LYFT) has the wind at its back but that doesn’t mean you should bet the ranch on it.
In Silicon Valley, “peak losses” are two words that can deliver a great earnings report.
That is where we are at with tech’s risk tolerance.
It’s no surprise some of these outfits burn money like no other, Lyft rejigged guidance from EBITDA losses of $1.15 billion to $1.175 billion down to $850 million to $875 million.
The main reason Uber (UBER), Lyft, and I’ll lump Netflix (NFLX) into the mix too, lose money is because they intentionally underprice their services allowing consumers to take advantage of a great deal in relative terms stoking outperforming revenue growth.
All those years of losses can be shouldered by the venture capitalists if revenue growth outweighs the pain of short-term losses.
But when a company takes that step to go public, everything changes.
No longer can they sweep the mountain of losses under the carpet to the deep-pocketed VCs, but they are penalized for it by a lower share price under the control of panicky shareholders.
Lyft started to raise prices in June and since Uber went public as well, the duopoly is in the same boat.
This means that your rideshare route home from the bar after the last call is about to get more expensive.
Since Lyft and Uber have a boatload of data, they will surgically pick and identify the routes and distance that do the least damage to end demand.
This will clearly be the routes and distances that have such an overwhelming and pent up demand that they can nudge up prices an extra 5% or more if they can get away with it.
In my head, these routes mean downtowns in metros with high paying jobs with poor public transportation links such as Los Angeles or Seattle.
Another route that I believe will get a bump in price is late-night surcharges often when partygoers are inebriated or out on the town.
Lyft has pockets of opportunities to exploit.
The cost inflation won’t stop there because even though Lyft “beat expectations” due to this pricing change, there is the long-term fixation on profitability that haunts management.
The pricing trick made Lyft rejig its annual targets expecting revenue of between $3.47 billion and $3.5 billion this year, up from a previously stated range of $3.275 billion to $3.3 billion.
The one metric that bodes well for the service is the 21.8 million “active riders” on its platform beating expectations by about 0.7 million year-over-year.
Lyft’s services are scalable and the growth will help mitigate losses and even though it’s in the public market, that doesn’t mean that it can’t stop growing.
Both ride-sharing services going public at almost the same time has meant that the price war that resulted in massive discounts to riders is no more.
Each service has incentives to raise prices in the most pain-reductive way possible for riders.
This particular tech category is certainly high risk - high reward as Lyft and Uber still face ongoing litigation in California courts concerning the job status of its drivers about whether they are classified as employees or independent contractors.
The more imminent issue is how much can they price hike before consumers balk.
Riders certainly have a price threshold that they aren’t willing to accommodate.
Luckily, Uber and Lyft have a treasure trove of data and can manipulate it to their interests by floating out trial balloons to test bold initiatives.
These two tech companies will not be able to shake off the volatility disease for the foreseeable future as the laundry list of predicaments spell turbulence.
Long term, they must show more to investors than “peak losses” but for the time being, they have survived the gauntlet.
I would not buy shares short-term, the most recent spike has snatched away an accommodative entry point.
https://www.madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/active-riders.png412800Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2019-08-09 01:02:072019-09-06 16:50:10High-Risk Lyft
https://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.png00Mad Hedge Fund Traderhttps://madhedgefundtrader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/cropped-mad-hedge-logo-transparent-192x192_f9578834168ba24df3eb53916a12c882.pngMad Hedge Fund Trader2019-07-16 09:49:512019-07-16 09:40:55July 16, 2019
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