- Snap (NYSE:SNAP) hit an all-time low of $11.28 this morning, but like a cat has bounced to a 6.3% gain as the close nears on heavy-volume and volatile trading amid a employee lockup expiration.
- Whether short squeeze or just a relief rally after poor performance, Snap's also benefiting from CEO Evan Spiegel's pledge that he and co-founder Robert Murphy wouldn't be selling any of their stakes this year.
- User growth is actually OK, says James Cakmak of Monness, Crespi, Hardt -- it's just that Snap's problems are 100% self-inflicted. "The users are there, and they're not monetizing; by definition, that's on them," he tells CNBC.
- By design, the company's not going to get to Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)'s scale, he says. "That's fine; as long as they're affluent customers that big advertisers and agencies want to go after, they should be able to monetize them, and we're not seeing that happen in North America."
- As noted earlier, Dan Loeb and Third Point got out of their SNAP position entirely during the quarter. Fidelity also trimmed its stake by more than half, ending the quarter with 15.2M shares (down 55% from March's end, but still remaining one of the company's top 10 shareholders).
- T. Rowe Price boosted its stake during the quarter to 37.9M shares from 28.3M shares, and Vanguard and BlackRock also added to their stakes.
- Now read: Snap: Growth Hacking And Other Excuses
Original article