Chris’ note: When Amazon went public in 1997, everyday investors like you and me could have won big. Five-hundred dollars was all you needed to invest to have over $1 million today.
As our tech expert, Jeff Brown, describes below, these kinds of opportunities have now dried up for everyday investors. But they haven’t totally disappeared…
Jeff is hosting an Emergency Meeting tomorrow night to share the details of what he says could be the next Amazon… and you can get in for pennies on the dollar. Make sure to sign up for his free event here.
Then read on to learn from Jeff which opportunities you need to stay clear of…
In 1997, Amazon (AMZN) was nowhere near the web retail powerhouse it is today. There were many who doubted e-commerce would take off at all.
The early, heady days of the internet made stars of companies like eToys, Pets.com, and so many more… only to bring them crashing down when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s.
We know now that Amazon didn’t go the way of these early failures. And its success would transform the entire retail space.
Amazon went public on May 15, 1997, at a valuation of $438 million. It started small. And it went public at a valuation that made sense for its size.
When a promising early stage company goes public, it can create historic opportunities for early investors to collect outsized gains. That’s what happened with Amazon…
On a split-adjusted basis, Amazon rose from $1.54 per share to over $3,200 per share today. That’s a gain of 211,782% – or 2,118 times your money. It’s enough to turn a $500 starting stake into $1 million and change.
What’s more, any investor could have reaped huge gains from an early investment in Amazon.
But a lot has changed since Amazon went public 24 years ago…
Now we see many private companies going public at valuations that simply make no sense.
And everyday investors often no longer have the chance to get in when the price is right. That’s certainly the story with some of the most infamous recent initial public offerings (IPOs)…
Companies like Amazon used to go public BEFORE they experienced massive growth.
But today’s companies are choosing to stay private longer – and going public only when they’re much larger.
And based on the current landscape for IPOs, most companies going public now would guarantee considerable losses.
Simply put, their earliest stages of growth have already passed. Retail investors can only pick up the scraps.
Here are some recent examples…
Uber (UBER) was the premiere IPO of 2019. It went public with an enterprise value of about $75 billion. That’s 171 times more than Amazon’s valuation when it IPO’d.
And practically all the gains went to private investors.
Some early investors turned $25,000 into $124 million… $50,000 into $248 million… or even $220,000 into a whopping $1 billion. This was far from the case for retail investors.
UBER plunged about 44% in the six months following its IPO. And retail investors who entered after the IPO and held on until now would have realized gains of only about 20%. That’s enough to turn every $1 investment into $1.20.
Or take data management software company Snowflake (SNOW). Last year, it held its highly anticipated IPO at a sky-high valuation of more than $65 billion. That made it the largest software IPO to date.
But smart investors could see Snowflake was nothing like Amazon in its earliest days. Snowflake has been around since 2012, building up its valuation in private capital.
By the time it went public last year, shares were trading at more than $240. Its valuation shot up on the initial surge of investment.
But the run-up didn’t last long. Since its IPO, Snowflake’s valuation has dipped from its all-time high of more than $105 billion in December to about $60 billion today – a fall of more than 40%.
I could go on…
I bring up these examples to illustrate a simple truth – investing in these IPOs could’ve meant losing your shirt.
Wall Street overhyped these stocks – and retail investors paid the price.
These stocks won’t bring much value to investors looking for promising early stage companies. The typical IPO process has steadily morphed into an albatross retail investors would do well to avoid…
But not in every case.
I want to help you learn to identify the winners. So I’ve prepared an Emergency Meeting where I’ll share all the details on one of the biggest tech IPO trends of the decade. At this meeting, I’ll tell you all about how one little-known investment vehicle is paving the way for even more profits in the tech sector this year.
It’s all happening tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET. Please mark that in your calendar… and go right here to sign up for my special event. It’s completely free.
I hope to see you there.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge