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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Do we really need a graph of a tech stock that goes "'20 Boom, '22 bust". Here's the thing - in this article about how Uber is beating Lyft, you could have shown a chart of Uber's stock price, and no one would've noticed the difference. Even the central thesis of the article is flawed. Both of these companies are starting to trade like they're big taxi companies. Which they are. The only advantage that Uber has is they do food delivery (that's going to go great during a recession) and scooters. Now, I don't know how much Uber makes on scooters, so shall we look at a competitor to see how well that industry is doing? Bird Scooter spac'd at 2.3Bn. How's that going? Oh well, you know, they're being delisted by NYSE because they're a penny stock.

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I was curious to see if you are right about the stock performance over time. It turns out that the two companies stock traded very similarly until May of this year. After that, Lyft really has had terrible performance relative to Uber:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LYFT/chart?p=LYFT#eyJpbnRlcn...

The problem is the google chart puts the zero line for the two stocks at their IPO date even though they have different IPO dates, as almost any two stocks you choose to compare would. If you're going to compare the two stocks at the same point in time, they should probably be both at zero on the first day when they both have a price, as Yahoo's chart does (switch to 5Y).

I'm scratching my head trying to figure out why Google Finance would graph stocks this way. The only thing I can think is they didn't consider the intersection of "comparing stocks" and "they might have IPOed in the time range".

Clearly the engineers they put on the project could only do the leetcode mediums instead of hards.

No, they launched the service, took their promotions and then left to launch newer products for more promotions. No one was left to improve the existing product.

I'm sure they assumed it would be eliminated before anyone noticed

Lyft dropped more in May, but otherwise the correlation just seems astounding...

All stocks are somewhat correlated. When the market overall goes up or down, it drags all the stocks along somewhat. When investors get more confident in the market overall, they also get more confident in each individual stock. See this example of Microsoft and Ford[1]. When the companies are so similar like Lyft and Uber, you'll of course get even more correlation. But Lyft and Uber differ beyond just May. Since June 1, Uber is up 16%, and Lyft is down 24%.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/chart?p=MSFT#eyJpbnRlcn...

Here's a comparison of Uber vs. Lyft stock price over last 5 years: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYFT:NASDAQ?comparison=...

Right if the above comment is trying to simplify it as both of them following the pattern of "'20 Boom, '22 bust", it's not true.

They did both start declining at the same time about 9 months before the overall market did, in April 2021 instead of Jan 2022. But from IPO up until that decline started, Lyft was already down 20% whereas Uber was up 50%. Then this decline has been much worse for Lyft as well, down 80% from April 2021 whereas Uber is down 55%.

That's a pretty big difference between the two companies.

Frankly, anybody saying "the only thing Uber has over X is Y" hasn't been paying enough attention.

Uber hasn't been doing scooters for a while. The rentals in the app are through Lime. Stuff like self driving and aviation also got offloaded to Aurora and Joby, respectively.

The third largest vertical for Uber is freight, not scooters. $1.8B in revenue there in Q2.

The rides business now has several arms, from B2B corporate accounts to numerous partnerships with players in adjacent and semi-adjacent industries.

The eats business is branching into general last mile delivery (e.g. cornershop acquisition).

The B2C strategy now is to bundle all the rides/rentals/food/deliveries services into the Uber One membership package, similar to the Amazon Prime/Costco volume-incentivizing model.

Look through the careers site and you see there's an ads arm spinning up.

I'm seeing a very clear change in focus from pie-in-the-sky ideas to more proven business strategies.

They want to be a platform not a ride sharing service.

Lyft also have bikes and scooters

https://www.lyft.com/scooters

Uber also has Uber Health.

WTF is that? Non-emergency ambulance?

Basically. Healthcare offices can use it to arrange transport for patients to appointments and such.

Uber Hearse is next.

I could actually see that happening.

Waiting for surge pricing to drop would be more awkward than usual.

Yeah, that sort of thing. I'm hurt, I need to go to hospital, but I don't need a mobile mini-hospital to rush to me.

I mean it is a niche that is desperately underserved and is the same people moving logistics as anything else.

Yes. It makes a lot of sense.

It didn't used to be underserved. We used to have taxis.

And while taxis didn't always like to pick up people in low-traffic areas, they always came for medical transports because they could bill insurance companies extra.

Who is this “we”? Back in the day my town (college town of ~100k) had lime 5 taxis total, and they mostly Only worked fri/sat night hauling the more responsible drunks home.

Basically it's business accounts for doctor offices to arrange transportation for their patients. Many elderly patients have trouble getting to doctor appointments because they don't have smartphones, can't drive, live in areas w/ poor public transit/taxi coverage, etc.

Lyft has exactly the same service to transport patients to medical appointments. Uber and Lyft routinely copy each other.

https://lyft.com/healthcare

My first taxi passenger in 2012 was a woman going for outpatient surgery. Her Medicaid plan was paying for the transportation. The company’s computer system kept track of her fare.

In the old days the “voucher” fares were on paper slips. Most the hospitals and clinics switched to the taxi company’s electronic systems by the late 2000’s, but we still saw a few of the old paper vouchers… one of my more memorable fares was a woman going home from the hospital with a paper voucher. She’d taken herself to the ER on account of her monthly misery. They gave her pain medicine, as if that would help her financial situation, or her PTSD from childhood abuse.

Nothing unique about Uber and Lyft having contracts.

> food delivery (that's going to go great during a recession)

I'm just curious why you think that food delivery will do great during a recession, could you comment on that? I find Uber Eats to be utterly overpriced. I would assume that people will scale down on eating out during a recession or will look for ways to save on it (picking up by themselves, eating more at home, etc.)

It's clearly sarcasm.

Sorry, sarcasm

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