The thing about Airbnb vs Uber is that there is not a corner of the globe untouched by Airbnb right now. China, Ethiopia, Haiti, Niger–you name it, Airbnb is there.
That speaks to Uber being a much more sophisticated business to launch in a particular city, and it makes sense for Uber to burn absurd cash trying to launch in all of these places well before Lyft or anyone else can. And it’s kind of amazing–they’re in like 100 cities in Brazil, and 50 in Mexico, and Morocco, Pakistan, Nigeria. But there are many places they haven’t made it to yet: Russia, China, and many small countries.
Meanwhile, Airbnb has no more places to grow, and its properties can easily just list on other services concurrently that offer better terms and which can also expand equally rapidly and quickly.
Then again it’s all funny money and nothing matters obviously so it will probably double every three months until 2024.
Another huge lol. This company, like Doordash, reports its revenues net of costs - they’re just recognizing their share of fees. This is exactly the kind of business that you’d expect would experience increasing margins as they scale in size, but nope. The expenses are just ratcheting up in lockstep with their revenues.
For comparison, if you want to see how it should work for businesses that efficiently scale up, here’s the data from Facebook’s prospectus:
One thing that scares me about AirBnB is that it already had competition and almost universally when friends of mine use other competing services they say its better than AirBnB. Anecdotal, sure, but I’m pretty wary of market leaders who deliver less than smaller competitors.
I’ve got $2k in a rollover IRA on fidelity and I have no idea what to do with it. It’s such a small amount that I don’t really care about it but remembering it exists on there is a hassle. I don’t have options trading on there so i can’t even gambool it away. Any opinions?
My FB ads have gone to mostly well-funded startup looking stuff, to mostly late night TV stuff like this - and a TON more ads.
I’ve never shorted a stock in my life. But I’m thinking about shorting FB. They might be hurting for ad revenue if they’ve become uncool in the startup world - which is basically as mature as junior high.
What should people who don’t believe in this stock market or any of these valuations do?
I’ve got my 401k chugging along, max contributions plugged into whatever allocations are recommended for my age. Not gonna change that.
What about excess savings beyond that? I don’t really want to short or buy puts. Should I just focus on boring stocks that will grind out better returns than most bonds or whatever and are much better insulated in the event of a correction?
You should allocate excess savings to a combination of high-yield savings accounts and total-market index funds. The best way to be better insulated in the event of a correction is to shift to a higher allocation of savings relative to stocks, not trying to identify a basket of “safer” stocks.
You could either continue investing excess savings at your current asset allocations (which is what I do) or you can think about stuff like paying down mortgage (if you own a property) or increasing EF.
