TWTR <-- Dead Meat

[ET180]

Sorry, I thought this was a stock traders forum where Twitter earning would be something that those who had expressed an interest in Twitter earnings previously would talk about when they were released. If it makes you feel better to believe we all think of no-one but you....well there's a name for that condition.

I just find it funny that you come back to a 4 month old thread in an attempt to take a victory lap about their blowout earnings and then the next day the damn thing opens and trades SEC up-tick rule all day and then closes at the lows. And it wasn't like that was the main point I had been making in this thread. 99% of what I had written had been about other things not related to Twitter's users. There's no way you just happened to stumble upon that post yesterday. It was a few sentences buried ~8 pages ago and tangential to the rest of the discussion. As I said yesterday, clearly this has been bugging you for the past 4 months as can be seen from your emotional and premature post. You couldn't even wait until the stock opened to see the reaction before posting it.

And although they did not report a US DAU drop as I had expected...I likely overestimated the number of Trump supporters on Twitter...obviously the numbers and guidance were not good. They clearly missed wall street's DAU growth projection and the stock tanked as a result. One if not the biggest single day price drops in the history of Twitter, at least by dollar amount.

As far as Twitter being useful, each person can ask themselves this question: For all the time you have spent on Twitter, what did you accomplish? For me, the answer was not much. I realized my time was better spent doing other things. Which is why I left.

 

[Sig]

I just find it funny that you come back to a 4 month old thread in an attempt to take a victory lap about their blowout earnings and then the next day the damn thing opens and trades SEC up-tick rule all day and then closes at the lows. And it wasn't like that was the main point I had been making in this thread. 99% of what I had written had been about other things not related to Twitter's users. There's no way you just happened to stumble upon that post yesterday. It was a few sentences buried ~8 pages ago and tangential to the rest of the discussion. As I said yesterday, clearly this has been bugging you for the past 4 months as can be seen from your emotional and premature post. You couldn't even wait until the stock opened to see the reaction before posting it.

And although they did not report a US DAU drop as I had expected...I likely overestimated the number of Trump supporters on Twitter...obviously the numbers and guidance were not good. They clearly missed wall street's DAU growth projection and the stock tanked as a result. One if not the biggest single day price drops in the history of Twitter, at least by dollar amount.

As far as Twitter being useful, each person can ask themselves this question: For all the time you have spent on Twitter, what did you accomplish? For me, the answer was not much. I realized my time was better spent doing other things. Which is why I left.

I guess your mind is a lot more linear than mine. I see the Twitter numbers pop up, see that they were up in every possible measure, remember a bunch of jackasses who were predicting a 50% drop, do a search for 50% drop and Twitter here on ET, and continue our conversation. Interestingly if you search my threads you'll find a number of times where I learned I was wrong, admitted it, and learned something from the experience. Again your mind must work much differently, for you it seems it's all about an ad hominem attack followed by pathetic attempts to deflect and minimize, wrapped up by sour grapes. You're a young guy, why not embrace the chance to learn and improve? What do you gain by this response of yours, rather than realizing that you were wrong on literally every aspect of your earlier prediction and figuring out what chain of events led you to those incorrect predictions so you don't do the same thing again? The apocryphal Einstein quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." comes to mind.

 

[ET180]

I guess your mind is a lot more linear than mine. I see the Twitter numbers pop up, see that they were up in every possible measure, remember a bunch of jackasses who were predicting a 50% drop, do a search for 50% drop and Twitter here on ET, and continue our conversation. Interestingly if you search my threads you'll find a number of times where I learned I was wrong, admitted it, and learned something from the experience. Again your mind must work much differently, for you it seems it's all about an ad hominem attack followed by pathetic attempts to deflect and minimize, wrapped up by sour grapes. You're a young guy, why not embrace the chance to learn and improve? What do you gain by this response of yours, rather than realizing that you were wrong on literally every aspect of your earlier prediction and figuring out what chain of events led you to those incorrect predictions so you don't do the same thing again? The apocryphal Einstein quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." comes to mind.

I admitted twice now in two different posts that the big drop in daily active users did not materialize as I expected. Probably not as many Trump supporters on Twitter as I had suspected. However, the US growth rate reduced significantly and they clearly missed wall street DAU estimates. The stock continued to drop significantly this morning even with SEC up-tick rule still in place and only bounced slightly apparently after news that Cathie Woods had been buying, it's still down over 1% for the day currently. From recent high to current price, the news put the stock in a bear market. And speaking of admissions, you still have not admitted that your far more speculative / unsubstantiated theory that Donald Trump was driving sensitive safe-space people off the platform to the extent that it had a significant negative impact on the business was wrong.

If that was true, then after removing him from the platform, Twitter should have at least met wall street's DAU estimates and given Twitter enough confidence to issue a strong guidance.

 

[destriero]

lol you have no credibility.

 

[Sig]

I admitted twice now in two different posts that the big drop in daily active users did not materialize as I expected. Probably not as many Trump supporters on Twitter as I had suspected. However, the US growth rate reduced significantly and they clearly missed wall street DAU estimates. The stock continued to drop significantly this morning even with SEC up-tick rule still in place and only bounced slightly apparently after news that Cathie Woods had been buying, it's still down over 1% for the day currently. From recent high to current price, the news put the stock in a bear market. And speaking of admissions, you still have not admitted that your far more speculative / unsubstantiated theory that Donald Trump was driving sensitive safe-space people off the platform to the extent that it had a significant negative impact on the business was wrong.

If that was true, then after removing him from the platform, Twitter should have at least met wall street's DAU estimates and given Twitter enough confidence to issue a strong guidance.

Hard to admit something you never said, try rereading from the top?

Again it's hard to figure out what you gain from your approach here? Maybe if you start with the whole "safe space" meme it will....accomplish what exactly?

Maybe if you move the goalposts from your predicted 50% drop in DAU and TWTR's price today compared to January to "did the analysts correctly guess accurately what earnings would exactly be, please ignore the fact that TWTRs stock went up 50% from the time I predicted impending gloom" then.....what exactly does that get you?

Perhaps if you insist that DAU going up after at least some Trump supporters left (like you, sour grapes aside), means that the hypothesis that there was a group willing to come back to TWTR was completely false....then you'll be proven a brilliant mind, unmatched in the field of basic logic?

Maybe if you continue to pretend you don't understand the split between TWTR's U.S. and overseas user base and somehow insist that despite the fact that your 50% drop was actually a growth in DAU even among US subscribers we should all ignore that because the non-U.S. growth was even higher will......wait, what does that do for you again?

If you start with the whole "TWTR users are losers, good people don't use it anyway...plus late night TV is dumb" line then we'll all what.....pretend your hero Trump wasn't the world's biggest TWTR user and come around to your point of view?

See you're missing the bigger point entirely. Your mistake wasn't one of degree and it really had nothing to do with the actual predictions themselves. Your mistake was viewing a business decision through a hyper partisan lens. And your continued mistake is your inability to see how foolish that is or even admit to yourself that you did that. In stark contrast to @kmiklas I'll add. Politics will change, even your politics will change. Heck when I was your age Republicans were for free trade, believed in science, were against racism and racists, and respected others opinions instead of resorting to childish name calling memes....and I was a Republican. So why shackle your success in trading (and business and life in general) to that political lens, or at the least why not be aware that the lens exists and it can lead you to make horribly incorrect decisions? What do you gain from this willful blindness? Is that a question you're willing to honestly ask yourself?

 

[ET180]

You claim that I view Twitter's "business" decision to censor a sitting president of the US through a hyper-partisan lens and then 4 sentences later you showcase your own hyper-partisan unsubstantiated biases. And you still won't admit that Twitter's decision to remove conservatives from their platform to appease the snowflakes failed to produce the substantially positive business outcome that you were expecting it would. Instead their stock crashed into a bear market, they missed growth estimates, and they issued poor guidance. That's not the response that you were expecting.

Btw:

If you start with the whole "TWTR users are losers, good people don't use it anyway...plus late night TV is dumb"

When you quote someone, quote what they said. Don't make things up and claim they said it.

 

[Sig]

You claim that I view Twitter's "business" decision to censor a sitting president of the US through a hyper-partisan lens and then 4 sentences later you showcase your own hyper-partisan unsubstantiated biases. And you still won't admit that Twitter's decision to remove conservatives from their platform to appease the snowflakes failed to produce the substantially positive business outcome that you were expecting it would. Instead their stock crashed into a bear market, they missed growth estimates, and they issued poor guidance. That's not the response that you were expecting.

Btw:



When you quote someone, quote what they said. Don't make things up and claim they said it.

Again, what are you accomplishing here? Seriously? Literally everything you predicted was dead wrong, and yet it's still all about moving goalposts, childish name calling, sour grapes, and the bizarre inability to get your head around the simple concept that when a predicted 50% drop actually ends up as a gain, the predictions that people coming back to Twitter would balance those leaving has been clearly more than demonstrated. There's a ton for you to learn from here, starting with the ability to differentiate between having partisan biases that one is aware of and doesn't use to make business decisions and one who is apparently comply unaware of their biases or how they're applying them even when confronted with a clear example. It's sad to see a somewhat irrational need to protect your anonymous persona's self image making you incapable of learning.

I will admit, I have learned from this as well. Apparently no matter how dead wrong someone is, there's almost no limit to the self justification they can engage in to avoid actually manning up and learning from the experience. Its a shame for a bright young guy like you behaving so obtusely though, especially when it only hurts you.

 

[ET180]

Again, what are you accomplishing here? Seriously? Literally everything you predicted was dead wrong, and yet it's still all about moving goalposts, childish name calling, sour grapes, and the bizarre inability to get your head around the simple concept that when a predicted 50% drop actually ends up as a gain, the predictions that people coming back to Twitter would balance those leaving has been clearly more than demonstrated. There's a ton for you to learn from here, starting with the ability to differentiate between having partisan biases that one is aware of and doesn't use to make business decisions and one who is apparently comply unaware of their biases or how they're applying them even when confronted with a clear example. It's sad to see a somewhat irrational need to protect your anonymous persona's self image making you incapable of learning.

I will admit, I have learned from this as well. Apparently no matter how dead wrong someone is, there's almost no limit to the self justification they can engage in to avoid actually manning up and learning from the experience. Its a shame for a bright young guy like you behaving so obtusely though, especially when it only hurts you.

Twitter is a growth company. It's not a Proctor and Gamble. Wall Street expects it to grow DAUs every quarter. Q1 of this year was an ideal environment for it to grow. Lots of news and people still stuck at home with stimulus money to spend. For it to fall significantly short of last year's growth shows that, at the very least, your thesis of getting rid of conservatives / censorship would help their business turned out to be wrong. If that thesis was correct, they should have been able to do better than their worst DAU growth rate since 2019.

Btw, my prediction that Twitter would take a significant hit to DAUs had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with demographics. As I pointed out, in the last election, the presidential race was close, close to a 50/50 split. Twitter's *potential* US audience is close to 50% Dem / liberal and 50% Republican / conservative (actually, factoring in turnout and demographic trends, probably closer to 60% Dem / 40% Republican and even then probably more like 30% solid Dem and 25% solid Republican with a wide center...not sure about the exact breakdown, but somewhere in there. So if you make a business decision that could potentially alienate say 20-30% of your active users...many of them will probably leave. Btw, when I made that prediction of a significant DAU drop, Parler was still an alternative. It had been trending #1 in the Apple App store for many weeks and growing very fast at the time. Had it been allowed to continue (and had tech companies not colluded to kill it), I still think Twitter would have experienced a significant drop in users. Trump had 88M followers when he was banned. Twitter only has 37M daily active US users. So if just under a quarter of Trumps 88M followers left (22M), there's your > 50% US drop.

I could make the same prediction that Twitter would take a significant DAU hit if they for some reason decided to ban the Pope. Which is not that far-fetched. The Catholic church has taken many stances that people at Twitter probably don't like very much. But it would be reasonable to expect that that doing so would annoy a lot of Catholics and cause them to leave the platform. That fact aside, I don't approve of Twitter censoring free speech. There are many on the far-left which take the same view. Jimmy Dore, Glen Greenwald, and even Bernie Sanders to name a few have been vocal about tech censorship even as it applies to Trump.

There's a ton for you to learn from here, starting with the ability to differentiate between having partisan biases that one is aware of and doesn't use to make business decisions and one who is apparently comply unaware of their biases or how they're applying them even when confronted with a clear example.

If I had let my dislike for censorship (not really something that I consider partisan) interfere with "business decisions", then I would have taken on a position. Instead, I could see that before earnings, the chart pattern actually looked bullish and I did not short / sell calls / buy puts. Here you again accuse me of having partisan biases. You claimed that in your previous post as well and then displayed several of your own partisan biases apparently not realizing the blatant double-standard. I'll take one example. You claimed Republicans don't believe in science. Really? And you think the Dems do? The party that believes it is perfectly fair to have a near fully-developed biological male compete in women's high school and college sports? The party that believes that fully-vaccinated people still need to wear masks? The party that believes biology is wrong and that a baby's gender cannot be determined at birth? They believe in more genders than Indian gods. That's not science. They even attack the objective foundation of all science - math as being racist. (https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511) Not an official party platform, but it sure is not conservatives supporting that bullshit. Of course they want to get rid of the advanced math classes because they cause inequality...(https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/). That's certainly not embracing science. If you really were an engineer and respect the objective foundation of all human invention and real progress, there's no way you can call that crap which your party supports science. Take a look in the mirror before accusing others of being partisans. China has to be laughing at us.

 

[Sig]

Twitter is a growth company. It's not a Proctor and Gamble. Wall Street expects it to grow DAUs every quarter. Q1 of this year was an ideal environment for it to grow. Lots of news and people still stuck at home with stimulus money to spend. For it to fall significantly short of last year's growth shows that, at the very least, your thesis of getting rid of conservatives / censorship would help their business turned out to be wrong. If that thesis was correct, they should have been able to do better than their worst DAU growth rate since 2019.

Btw, my prediction that Twitter would take a significant hit to DAUs had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with demographics. As I pointed out, in the last election, the presidential race was close, close to a 50/50 split. Twitter's *potential* US audience is close to 50% Dem / liberal and 50% Republican / conservative (actually, factoring in turnout and demographic trends, probably closer to 60% Dem / 40% Republican and even then probably more like 30% solid Dem and 25% solid Republican with a wide center...not sure about the exact breakdown, but somewhere in there. So if you make a business decision that could potentially alienate say 20-30% of your active users...many of them will probably leave. Btw, when I made that prediction of a significant DAU drop, Parler was still an alternative. It had been trending #1 in the Apple App store for many weeks and growing very fast at the time. Had it been allowed to continue (and had tech companies not colluded to kill it), I still think Twitter would have experienced a significant drop in users. Trump had 88M followers when he was banned. Twitter only has 37M daily active US users. So if just under a quarter of Trumps 88M followers left (22M), there's your > 50% US drop.

I could make the same prediction that Twitter would take a significant DAU hit if they for some reason decided to ban the Pope. Which is not that far-fetched. The Catholic church has taken many stances that people at Twitter probably don't like very much. But it would be reasonable to expect that that doing so would annoy a lot of Catholics and cause them to leave the platform. That fact aside, I don't approve of Twitter censoring free speech. There are many on the far-left which take the same view. Jimmy Dore, Glen Greenwald, and even Bernie Sanders to name a few have been vocal about tech censorship even as it applies to Trump.



If I had let my dislike for censorship (not really something that I consider partisan) interfere with "business decisions", then I would have taken on a position. Instead, I could see that before earnings, the chart pattern actually looked bullish and I did not short / sell calls / buy puts. Here you again accuse me of having partisan biases. You claimed that in your previous post as well and then displayed several of your own partisan biases apparently not realizing the blatant double-standard. I'll take one example. You claimed Republicans don't believe in science. Really? And you think the Dems do? The party that believes it is perfectly fair to have a near fully-developed biological male compete in women's high school and college sports? The party that believes that fully-vaccinated people still need to wear masks? The party that believes biology is wrong and that a baby's gender cannot be determined at birth? They believe in more genders than Indian gods. That's not science. They even attack the objective foundation of all science - math as being racist. (https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511) Not an official party platform, but it sure is not conservatives supporting that bullshit. Of course they want to get rid of the advanced math classes because they cause inequality...(https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/). That's certainly not embracing science. If you really were an engineer and respect the objective foundation of all human invention and real progress, there's no way you can call that crap which your party supports science. Take a look in the mirror before accusing others of being partisans. China has to be laughing at us.

At this point it's clear you're at a point in your life where you're fundamentally incapable of introspection and the concept of examining why you're doing what your doing. I'm trying to help you develop that skill, as I would have appreciated someone doing for me at your age, but there's only so much I can do. With luck perhaps it's something you can mature into.