Written by StockNews.com
Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP) just IPO’ed today, and already one Wall Street firm, Pivotal Research, has initiated coverage with a Sell rating and $10 price target. That represents a massive 58% downside to the stock’s opening price of $24 today.
The firm commented in a note to clients:
Snap is a promising early stage company with significant opportunity ahead of itself. Unfortunately, it is significantly overvalued given the likely scale of its long-term opportunity and the risks associated with executing against that opportunity. Significant ongoing dilution from share-based compensation will likely represent an additional negative consideration for the stock. Firm values Snap at $10 per share on a YE2017 basis. As the stock priced well above this level in its IPO, they rate its shares Sell.
The company has faced a bevy of criticism running up to its IPO. Snap isn’t close to turning a profit, and it even warned investors that it may never do so, but the market environment that Snap launched its IPO into couldn’t be more forgiving. Stocks have been soaring straight up for months on end, with every major equity index imaginable sitting at all-time highs. Of course, the downside to these conditions is that expectations are also quite high — so any hiccup for the will likely be met with heavy selling.
Snap Inc., formerly known as Snapchat, calls itself a camera company, although it doesn’t make physical cameras (unless you count a recent limited-run pair of glasses with an integrated camera in them). Instead, its claim to fame is its Snapchat messaging app, which millions of users use each day on their smartphones to share photos and short video clips. Its real-time photo and video filters have proven extremely popular, allowing users to morph their appearance to look like animals, fictional characters, or just about anything else one can think of.
Whether Snap can eventually leverage its current popularity to make any real money remains to be seen, but so far today, investors have been more than happy to snap up SNAP stock on its IPO day. Snap Inc. shares were last trading at $24.96 per share on Thursday afternoon, up $0.96 (+4.00%) — well above its $17 IPO pricing level…
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