Programmatic
So… the value of bitcoin ($BTC.X) is up +100% so far this year.
That’s a year-to-date figure taking into account just the last four-and-a-half months.
At the start of 2019, one bitcoin — which is equal to 100 million Satoshis — was valued at slightly below $4,000 (USD).
This week, the value of one bitcoin again surpassed $8,000 and so now you will hear about crypto more than you’d like.
As a contrast, yesterday (Monday), the stock market had a very bad day.
When it’s a bad day, as opposed to a bad week or a bad month or even a bad quarter, there is more noise in the airwaves.
But the fun part about everyone’s pessimism is that it can allow for a good buying opportunity when there’s value somewhere.
As a result, I gladly bought shares in the company The Trade Desk ($TTD) for the first time.
In the past year, 12 months (not YTD), The Trade Desk is up almost 150%.
In the past two-and-a-half years, its stock is up almost 550%.
The Trade Desk describes itself as “an investment in programmatic advertising for the whole internet.”
One of its biggest competitors is (was) AppNexus, which was acquired by AT&T ($T) last Summer for almost $2 billion.
Yesterday, I was pessimistic about AT&T ($T) and its marriage with HBO, so I don’t feel like disparaging the company again, even though it’s sometimes fun.
But let’s just say that I am easily more optimistic with The Trade Desk’s future:
“The mobile, audio, and connected TV channels continue to be key drivers for The Trade Desk.
Gross spending on mobile in-app and mobile video ads on The Trade Desk platform each increased 60% year-over-year during the quarter. Total mobile ad spending (also including mobile web spending) accounted for 45% of total revenue.
The audio and connected TV continued to be The Trade Desk’s fastest-growing channels, with audio spending rising 270% year-over-year and connected TV spending coming in over three times what it was in the year-ago period.”
Oftentimes, really good or really bad news will get all the headlines.
Case in point… Uber’s ($UBER) lack of an uber-debut in the affirmative:
“Morgan Stanley’s job, as an IPO underwriter, was to intermediate between the desires of the issuer and its private investors, on one hand, and its new public investors, on the other hand. Half the job is to manage the expectations of the company and its private investors, getting them to give the public market what it wants in terms of price and structure; the other half of the job is to stir up demand from public investors, getting them to give the company what it wants in terms of IPO price and aftermarket trading. The problem with Uber is just that the public and private views of Uber were very far apart, and there’s only so much a bank can do to bridge them. Uber didn’t want to sell for $60 billion, the public didn’t want to buy at $100 billion, and so Morgan Stanley was more or less bound to look bad.”
Meanwhile, before the opening bell, I bought shares in The Trade Desk at $175 per share, while everyone was screaming “Fire!”
Do not overlook the small players just because they’re, well, smaller:
“In the past, many niche software companies would tap out at $20M to $50M in revenue. Since markets online are 5–10X bigger than they used to be, these same companies will now scale to $100M+ in revenue and a $1B+ market cap. Companies that in the past would have been a $1B market cap company, are suddenly supporting $10B to $20B market caps per the current slate of IPOs.
This does not mean there will be more outliers worth $100 billion or more, but rather the base revenue a random company can achieve is a few folds higher than just a few years ago due to the growth and liquidity of the Internet.”
Success is about the rate of return earned after the initial investment, not about the size of the sunk cost put in at the beginning.
