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Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Who is buying this stock?! A company that burns through a TREMENDOUS amount of cash raises enough for just about a year's worth of operations, meaning that they will almost certainly dilute their stock against next year just to pay for cost of doing business. Their future consists of insisting that they aren't "just online storage", and competing on pricing that is trending towards 0.

I'm not invested in this company one way or another, but it really baffles me that people think the company is worth investing in. I'm sure I'm missing something, since I haven't dug deeply into their financials or anything.

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>Who is buying this stock?! and

>I haven't dug deeply into their financials or anything.

should be mutually exclusive, don't you think? If you haven't looked at their financials or anything, how do you know whether it is a good investment or not? You can't just look at 'macro-trends' and determine if individual companies are a buy or not.

e.g. since 1970s, cigarette industry has been in a steady volume decline. Guess which stock has been (by far) the best performing stock during since that period? Yep, Philip Morris (which recently split into Altria and Philip Morris)

> since 1970s, cigarette industry has been in a steady volume decline

In the US - not globally. The tobacco market is growing and sales are increasing on a worldwide basis. As developed countries stop smoking, developing countries start - and developing countries often have far larger populations.

And the product is taxed heavily in the USA which gives the manufacturers cover for price increases. Tobacco is really profitable even in the US.

Plus the eCig market has given them new growth prospects.

I'm not an expert, but by all accounts the financials for them are somewhat grim: http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/03/24/boxs-ipo-rev... They're spending more in sales than they're making back in revenue (nevermind profit). Building a company around spending $2 to make $1 isn't good for the long term (ask Groupon how that worked out for them).

> (ask Groupon how that worked out for them).

They're a $5B company four years after their IPO and are selling ~$2.5B annually.. not the failure that people keep representing.

Their revenue is flat and they make no profits. That's pretty terrible in this market. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=GRPN

a company feeding a strong addiction is a good long term bet, unlike box

Traders most likely. They only sold around 10% of the shares in the IPO creating a fairly low float. Low-float stocks are prone to explosive moves which was likely what the underwriters wanted. If the stock can gain momentum and drift higher over the comings months, it will be much easier to place a larger secondary and collect the money the company needs.

Thanks - explains to me more fully why companies who IPO want a "large pop" - it's not just to please the underwriters and early investors or visibility.

For those that wish to read the financials for Box as I did:

http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/box-inc-718252-74...

>Who is buying this stock?!

Speculators that bought and sold to make a profit today.

I bought a few hundred shares, sold about half of them (guaranteeing a profit even if the other half crashes to 0) and am holding the other half as either a long term investment or waiting for the next pump and dump.

Remember that it is very hard to short an IPO so the market pressure is mostly up (even more so than normal). More interestingly will be what happens in coming weeks.

It can become another Jive software, which has traversed from 16 to 24 (in 3 months after IPO), 6 now.

They are not selling file storage, they are selling enterprise content management.

But their ECM offering is basically Dropbox++ rather than Opentext/Hyland/Alfresco/etc. They don't have nearly the feature set of the big guys, and there aren't many enterprises particularly interested in ECM (the "M" part) who would take Box seriously. They might as a simple cloud storage platform, but only if they need something like that and haven't already got something similar from Google or Microsoft.

(I'm writing this as the person responsible for ECM & Google Apps at a large enterprise. We looked at Box and were non-plused.)

And you were plused by Opentext/Hyland/Alfresco? just curious...

Congrats to these guys, nice debut.

>Who is buying this stock?

Not me, but that's what makes a market.

..box it and they will come

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