So Much For Chasing “Hot” Stocks! Take a Look & Weep

If you tune in to your favorite popular financial 24hr media channel, it would seem that there only ten companies in the world to talk about [but, as the evidence herein shows, they did not make for profitable investments. So much for chasing “hot” stocks!]

The 2nd table [below] shows the latest valuation funding from the so call “unicorns”.  A unicorn is a private startup company valued at $1 billion dollar or more. They are interesting and very disruptive in some cases like Uber and Airbnb but it’s also important to make money. Since these companies are private, there’s no way of knowing if they are profitable. An educated guess tells me that most of these companies are bleeding cash. That’s why they constantly need more funding – and the next round of funding is always at a higher valuation. You can play that game as long the capital markets/private investors like you but what we are witnessing according to the table and news [is that] valuation in the private startup world is falling apart. There [is] a new label going around: unicorpse.  That means the bubble is bursting. Many of them cannot fund their losses internally for more than a few months and now have almost no access to external funding. Layoffs have begun in many of these companies. Money is being raised at lower valuations than the previous round of financing and the cycle is now in reverse. Uber is worth $62.5 billion?!?!