Coinbase Opens at $102 Billion Valuation on First Day of Public Trading (axios.com) 66
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase opened trading on Wednesday at $381 per share, giving it a fully diluted market value of around $102 billion. From a report: This is a slight premium to the most recent private trades for Coinbase stock, and more than 50% higher than the reference price set last night by the Nasdaq. Coinbase's public listing has been among the most anticipated in recent years, with expectations it will garner a massive market cap. Further reading: Coinbase's blockbuster debut is a 'watershed' for crypto -- but there are risks ahead.
Just like Crazy Eddie.. Prices are insane! (Score:1)
Thank the Fed
Coinbase poor house video... (Score:2)
https://twitter.com/Sicarious_... [twitter.com]
A good summary...
while the true value is (Score:1)
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I'll give you $50 for it. [youtube.com]
Where is the value? (Score:3)
I'm under the impression that Coinbase is to cryptocurrencies as Nasdaq is to stocks. I can see an exchange being valuable, but that valuable? Do they also directly hold a lot of cryptocurrency?
Re:Where is the value? (Score:5, Insightful)
They get bigger fees than Visa/Mastercard. I’m sure they hold some currency, but not nearly enough to justify the valuation IMO. I wouldn’t touch them with your 10’ pole, but some might call that risk aversion.
Personally, I find it rather ironic that an exchange for crypto currency would hold so much value, as that would imply the only value of BTC and others are transactional and not as a store of value or as a currency. I find this especially ironic given the extremely high transacttion fees Coinbase charges.
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Rolls Royce just had it's best year ever (Score:5, Interesting)
We're putting too much money at the top, hoping it'll trickle down. The wealthy have more money than they can spend or invest. So they're looking at increasingly risky investments because they aren't personally risking anything.
A few nights back Tucker Carlson, a well known pundit on Fox News, suggested to his audience of millions that the reason scientists are telling us to keep wearing masks is that the vaccines don't work.
My first thought was how did he get away with that. Not because I expected liberals to call him out (they did, it was completely ineffectual) but because I figured his bosses would want everybody vaccinated so the economy would start back up sooner. There's plenty of research that shows that addressing pandemics rapidly has overall better economic outcomes. So why was Carlson allowed to make this point?
Then it hit me, the people at the top would are the only ones who could call him on it are completely disconnected from the part of the economy that is hurt by the pandemic. Their wealth went up. And they've used the economic downturn to buy up property at rock bottom prices and buy out competitors (increasing profits by laying people off as you do after a Merger or Acquisition).
To bring it back to TFA, there is no way in hell Coinbase is worth 100 billion dollars. They don't have a product. They make nothing useful for humanity. Even if you think cryto is good they're a middle man. At best their harmless and at worst parasitic. And that's before we get into a discussion of the harm crypto will do and how none of it's benefits are likely to ever materialize (you can fine plenty of articles explaining how easy currency manipulation is with even the largest Crypto coins, some of them right here on
So what do we have here? A ton of billionaires and multi-millionaires with too much money taking risks with it that can and will bite us all in the ass if they set off a run on stocks and banks. Remember, when these people lose money they start doing mass layoffs and making the survivors work harder for less money. That's what happened in 2008 and if we keep letting "wealth migration" carry on to it's logical conclusion that's what'll keep happening.
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And we all know you are the one modding yourself up and everyone else down. No need to pretend otherwise.
You can't mod your own comments up, you idiot, even when you're posting anonymously.
Re:Rolls Royce just had it's best year ever (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is more about “protecting” their wealth than showing it off. If all your money is in the stock market, the first thing you do is buy a[nother] house. But, then you would like your money to outpace inflation so your purchasing power does not decline— and you treat the inflation rate as that of the stock market indexes. So, you have to outperform the major indecies over the long-term.
People used to look at commercial real-estate, but that is too risky now with the potential for post-co
It's not a scorecard (Score:2)
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it's Power. The power to make the rest of us do anything they want.
Good point. They want to have poor people around, people without even a basic financial safety net, to ensure that there will be people around to say "How high?" when they say "Jump!"
If nobody's poor (Score:2)
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Re:Rolls Royce just had it's best year ever (Score:4, Informative)
Who owns stocks: Households by net worth
Top 1% 51.8%
Top 90-99% 35.4%
50%-99% 12.1%
Bottom 50% 0.7%
The Fed found that the average household in the richest tenth of US households, by net worth, owned vastly more stock than those in the bottom half. That is, those households that owned stock in the wealthiest 10 percent of households, owned an average $1.7 million of stock while those in the bottom 50 percent owned an average of only about $11,000. Virtually all (94 percent) of the wealthiest 10 percent of households owned stocks, while only about a third (31 percent) of the bottom 50 percent owned stock, either directly or indirectly (e.g., through mutual funds).
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-owns-us-stock-foreigners-and-rich-americans [taxpolicycenter.org]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/most-americans-dont-have-a-real-stake-in-the-stock-market/?sh=4b487d221154 [forbes.com]
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Who owns stocks: Households by net worth
Top 1% 51.8% Top 90-99% 35.4% 50%-99% 12.1% Bottom 50% 0.7%
That's a cute list you've got there.
Now tell me which group caused hedge fund managers to start chewing on the ends of gun barrels a couple of months ago when meme stocks stepped in to fuck shit up.
You can stop pretending that a mere fraction of a percent, doesn't meme anything.
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Well Melvin Capital is still in business, if bruised. Some people got rich, some got poorer and sitting here a couple months later the ownership of the stock market on a whole is unchanged.
Truth is, all the individual stock owners, all the 401k's, all the pensions, all the life insurance and all the IRA's of 90% of the public still control less than 30% of the stock market, maybe less.
Falling (Score:2)
Feel a bit sorry for those who got caught up in the hoopla and bought at the $420 to $430 level thinking they'd be able to find another fool who'd pay even more to take shares off their hands.
It's now dropped to $360/share
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Sometimes causing a spike and subsequent fall are easy ways to make money. I learned that in Trading Places.
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Day 1 of IPO is always a hot mess, as the market struggles to find a range. I don't know why anybody would step in to it unless they had some kind of model and a lot of money to run that model, and it was back-tested thoroughly. There should be less volatility in the next few days, then when the lock-out period where insiders can't sell expires we'll get a better grip on price. I don't have much hard data, but it seems like every big IPO has attractive entry points a few months or even years later.
This is a direct listing, not an IPO. There's no lock up period with this. Every shareholder is free to sell whenever they want.
https://www.bankrate.com/investing/coinbase-ipo-direct-listing/
Tim's Discount Prices! (Score:2)
Buy Premium Prices! Tim buys his prices from China! Mine are REAL. American Made! [youtube.com]
It's a bit weird we get so excited about Ponzi schemes, and the media coverage is downright intense. I guess this is the result of a get-rich-quick mentality. Honestly if you want to make money with far less risk, buy real estate. It's not going to make you a billionaire over night, you need to play the Spanish Lottery [wikipedia.org] to do that.
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Yeah, the paid bitcoin trolling is a pretty good indicator of what is really going on.
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I have demonstrated by my own actions that you can make a lot of money on bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. You simply buy low and sell high. In short, get in before the hype and leave before the crash.
It's not clear what the current incarnation of cryptocurrency has to offer society, to me it seems broken by design. Long term, we'll hopefully have a workable and scalable transaction system out of it.
But the practice of mining will probably need to end before the next phase of evolution can occur with the t
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I’d say most real estate investments are pretty high risk, but that is my bias. The only way to reliably make money as a small investor in real estate is to be a slum lord. Even that has pretty good risk today with the lack of a solution to rent relief.
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The only way to reliably make money as a small investor in real estate is to be a slum lord.
Bridge loan on a 1-4 unit rental that already has tenants in good standing. Do the math and make sure you can cover your payments. Stay on top of your taxes so you can get the deductions you're owed, else it won't work. (depreciation is very useful)
This is not the same as a slum lord. You're simply collecting pretty ordinary rent from middle class families and maintaining the property to a standard that allows you to continue to keep that class of resident. Being an actual slum lord where you let your prope
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Maybe it is just the markets I have lived in, but most of the cap rates I see are under 5% and need ~40% down to be cash flow positive, and you are just seeing a ~3% rate of return excluding potential appreciation and without vacancy reserves. Add in closing costs and the investment isn’t really liquid for 5-10 years (as an investment). If you are looking at a 30-year timeline I get it, but only barely. I guess if you can do 90% of the upkeep yourself the risk is reduced some, but still not easy.
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Bridge loans don't have the requirements of 40% down. But the interest is high. They're a temporary measure designed to move into a different loan or to convert into a sale.
Absolutely depends on the market, or really on the parameters of the investment. Not my first rodeo.
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Any idiot has been able to make money in real estate since about 2003. That's very unusual, and is causing a lot of problems. In a normal economy you are absolutely correct, and there's a very good reason for it.
Bring Back the Pets.Com Sock Puppet Dog (Score:1)
Great (Score:2)
Add crypto to the ever expanding number of bubbles in the economy. We're having a bubble bubble. Bubblception.
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I don't think anyone serious doubts that cryptocurrency is in a bubble. In its defense, cryptocurrency appears designed as the ideal bubble asset. Never expires, not tied to anything real, an asset whose entire list of features are "is an asset". You can make as many copies of you like, but you have to brand each one differently. You can create sub-tokens that exist on the existing ledgers. Literally any amount of anything can be expressed in these terms.
Starting with bitcoin, stern men have frowned an
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...But this doesn't matter, with 1T$ market cap, Bitcoin is already indestructible.
And what exactly was the value of the entire housing market market circa 2008 prior to the crash?
Or the value of the entire dot-com that went dot-bomb?
You can either stop pretending that market valuation is some kind of bulletproof insurance policy, or you can stand there like an idiot and believe the crash won't ever happen. You know, because history is such a good storyteller...
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The crash is not where you think. Are you sure to understand what money is? The USD had a supply growth of more than 30% over a one year period. Do you expect people to look at their savings being depreciated without doing anything?
Gold was the old hedge for this kind of situation, and the price of Gold failed to increase.
Gold has increased in value 50 - 80% just in the last five years. And you are questioning if I understand what money is? Your savings account hasn't been connected to the value of gold for damn near a century now.
The price of gold has increased Bitcoin happened to be 1000x better than Gold. In other words, this is not Bitcoin which is increasing, this is the USD which is crashing!
Neither shiny yellow metal or virtual currency makes a hell of a lot of sense in the big picture. Back when I was trying to convince my father that I was "rich" based on my baseball card collection, he told me that something is worth only what others are willing to pay. Bitcoin is massively hype
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We are not writing about baseball cards. Money in the free market is a winner take all situation. Gold was the best money for 5000+ years because Gold was the best on what we call: scarcity.
I find it rather funny that we like to call gold perpetually "scarce" when humans used to make all kinds of pointless shit out of it.
The scarcity here is the stock-to-flow ratio. Once you are using the best money. you have nowhere else to go.
Bitcoin is credible, unique, and Bitcoin is scarcer than Gold. You are just witnessing the obsolescence of Gold, the (slow) crash of the USD, and the rise of Bitcoin. This is something irreversible.
Irreversable? The Titanic was "unsinkable" too. Ignorance will get you nowhere. The whole fucking thing is a couple of major exchange crashes away from imploding on itself. Gold, it's scarcity, and it's usefulness well beyond fashion, haven't gone anywhere for hundreds of years. You are delusional if you think something like Bitcoin is going to change that, especially whe
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Bitcoin has a zero attack surface, after 13 years of unsuccessful attacks...
Right. Tell that to everyone who used to hold funds in a broken exchange.
Bitcoin is better than Gold, this is what matters. An Executive Order 6102 against Bitcoin would be ineffective.
The exchanges are not part of Bitcoin. You could always use p2p exchanges for privacy reasons (bisq...)
You should not forget the Gresham's law, people always spend the 'bad money' first.
Bitcoin is permission-less, you don't need the permission of the government to use it. This is already happening: https://youtu.be/Idlf_LLyi1o [youtu.be]
Bitcoin is a "currency" that is currently recognized and accepted by a mere fraction of the international banking industry and daily money exchange, and requires a minimal level of understanding, reliance, and application of 21st Century technology to utilize. Gold on the other hand, can be used as barter between damn near anyone on the entire planet in every country, and does not require technology beyond an agreed understanding of
Buffet-isms (Score:2)
Does A Comparison Work? (Score:1)
Let’s try another comparison then. JPMorganChase, one of the biggest global banks, has a market cap of about $467 billion. It has a proven track record, a long history, and a pretty savvy CEO. It just doesn’t seem plausible that effectiv
This is the end (Score:1)