Thursday, 11 February 2016

The Twitter Fatality

Twitter's fourth quarter results should set off the alarm bells, so if you are proud owner of Twitter stock, you may want to reconsider your investment choices.The number of active users remained at the same level as in the third quarter, bringing Twitter's main problem to the surface. Without new active users it is hard for Twitter to realize higher revenues through advertising. Now, it seems the time of easy growth is over and bigger investments will need to be made to make the user base grow, but this is costly. Also, since Twitter is a fairly focused company, it will be hard for Twitter to grow when their current market becomes (or is) saturated. As we've seen with multiple tech companies, once the market is saturated, stocks tend to plummet (e.g. TomTom). Moreover, it is historical fact that total advertisement income declines in times of a recession. The possibility of a new recession in the United States could therefore put another strain on Twitter's performance.
Let's take the simple investing rule of thumb into account that: 1) You don't want to buy unless the stock is going up, and 2) You don't want to sell unless the stock is going down. Since Twitter stock has lower tops and lower bottoms, this one is definitely going down. The second rule of thumb goes nicely along with our idea of Twitter being a bad investment. Sell or go short, don't keep this stock.