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Comment on Square stock drops 10%, is now less than IPO price

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Someone with a little more knowledge of financial markets, help me out here. Is it really news if a tech company's stock drops 8-10% on a day when NASDAQ is down over 3%?

Mostly if we're discussing how equity compensation might not be the best option. Or how preferred investors and founders took what they could from the workers (in response to "refragmentation").

The Square IPO was less than employees who started after their last round and preferences made it even worse, meaning even though there is a liquidity event, employees who took options are out. With this significant drop, other employees who exercised their options (and paid taxes) are also out.

How did preferences make it worse? Generally, preferred shares convert to common in the event of an IPO, so preferences are discarded.

With Square, investors were guaranteed a 20 percent premium on their investment, which would be worth $18.56 a share, meaning Square had to issue more shares to those investors, further devaluing the stock owned by employees.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-19/square-emp...

Not really. Tech stocks are more volatile because more of their value (compared to someone like GE or P&G) is based on hypothetical growth projections- revenue and profit. Any market news can swing these stocks wildly- up or down. Hortonworks HDP dropped 35% y'day just because they decided to raise more money $100M and investors felt that something is wrong.

Yes, in the short term scheme of things. The bigger news is the long-term trend and the crossing of the psychological IPO threshold.

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