Contemplating my business/loan disasters of last year.1@
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What is with these large volume after hour trades? And during the last 5 mins, the trading went bezerk, ridiculous volume.
Perhaps it was as a result of big buyers buying to pump up their call options? Triggering a short squeeze?
In which case next week it could gap up in the morning. Maybe all the way to 3.4, but it will be very short lived.
Be prepared to trade.
What are everyone's thoughts on the stock? think it goes up or down tomorrow. I'm hate watching the swings.
Wow, optionshouse is pretty similar pricing to choice. I had never used Choice so I only went by price, but man, this looks really good. Wonder if they cater to canadians? some how I doubt it. They'll make me bloody sign an IRS slip.
Well, scottrade did have good customer support, but honestly, they suck in almost every other aspect. I was glad to be done with them.
But yeah, that's a good strategy to just use choice for puts.
Do it now before Oct 1st, so you have a way of doing some serious trading around then.
Hopefully it is a simple enough process.
If you're considering trading options, or just in general moving to a better trading platform (scottrade sucks big time). Check out http://www.choicetrade.com
I'm not on there yet, because I'm canadian, and trapped with TD waterhouse at the moment, but choicetrade has .15 cent commissions for options (per 100). and on the week of option expiration, option commissions are zero.
And they have great trading platforms, including esignal.. Wish I could trade with them!!
That's the best way to trade imo. Never go completely out, just keep buying back low and selling higher (never with more than 50% of holdings). Like a living organism, trading your way to lower and lower averages.
Don't mess with options actually, unless you use a broker that charges very little for them. Most brokers rape you on the option commissions. The 250 puts I bought cost me $350 in commissions!
Yeah, day trading this isn't a bad strategy. Wish I had been doing it, but I chose to keep away for the longest time. It could go up really hard, but the day of earnings will be the most volatile in my opinion, and that's the day I'm flying out to vegas (sigh)
No way man. If you want to work for them, it isn't a bad place to work, plus I worked at their main HQ, the other small studio locations they acquired are run completely differently. I'm sure those are 10 - 6 type gigs.
In fact Zynga contacted us about our robot game, tried to get us to do a publishing deal with them (for those that are curious, this is our midcore title rawbots.net - build em! battle em! - for PC and Mac initially).
We of course declined, but if Zynga were to offer to buy us out :) I would be happy... well lets say I wouldn't be upset.
No clue. lol
We need a good chartist on board
Zynga chart if anyone is interested.
5 mins - 15 mins and 3 mins
http://i.imgur.com/WSyeX.gif
I'm reading that it was a rumor because a bunch of equity players offered them $20/share to go private. I still have my employee stock from EA that I had bought when it was $60/share lol. never sold it.
BTW, any reason why zynga fell so hard in the morning? 3.09 at the time of writing this.
For a similar purchase price they could buy EA... and I've worked at EA too so.. for my money, I'd definitely pick EA over zynga 100%.
Sell themselves? That could only be to facebook, because who else is going to buy them given the mess they're in?
FB would buy them for two things: Mobile and gambling.
But I doubt zuck will pay them $10/share.
Maybe they're trying to get all the bad news out of the way so that they could bombard us with just the good news?
You mean after another reverse split? 1 for 7 this time? well 1 for 10 just to be safe.
Oct 1st
Listen, protect yourself before earnings. My advice, buy some puts on the day before earnings is announced to lock in the price. after earnings the stock could go up (they might have a serious ace up their sleeve), but if it falls hard, you are covered. buy some puts.
My thought is, I think we trend up till earnings. But who knows, I don't think earnings will be good, am hoping to be proven wrong on that one. But anticipation of *better earnings* and higher guidance might be good enough to push the stock up till earnings is announced.
You're absolutely right. Buying more companies is just going to make the company they bought profitable.
And from my experience, when a company is bought, usually that company stops trying (they breathe their sigh of relief and look at this as a profitable exit). Generally there's tension between the CEO of both companies and the CEO that gets bought out usually gets fired. Then the loyal employees of that company usually stop caring as well.
In this case Frederic Descamps (CEO of A bit lucky) is one of the nicest guys on the planet. I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for the guy and his ethics. You compare him and Mark Pincus and you'll see two polar opposites.
I know how each of them feels about each other, so I'll reserve judgment for now, but yeah, Zynga needs to ship something or the stock could easily* fall below cash.
Why could it fall below cash?
1) The public might not be convinced Zynga is operating on an efficient budget. 3000 employees and not much to show for it.
2) The lawsuits - we still don't know what is happening with those, we only know Mark cashed out (a huge misstep by him in my opinion) and might pay for it if a fed investigation is done.
3) Does Zynga actually know how to make games? They haven't really made games in the past (farmville is not a game) and the market wants games now (where as previously they didn't know what they wanted).
4) They seem to be missing the boat on a lot of opportunities, spending money like they just don't care.
5) Pincus's track record for companies isn't very good. Look at SPRT, see where that hovers at. Once Pincus sold that, he didn't care.
That's the only reason I haven't sold yet and written off this company.. I'm just thinking about those deadlines and I feel if they were smart they'd get the stock price up...
I hope Zynga has an ace up its sleeve here.. for some reason I'm still thinking till the end of this year it is just going to be bad news for them all the way.. But I hope I'm wrong...
Disclosure (for the guys that still think I'm short):
I've got 25k shares and I finally bought 25k put options today on the way up... I'm protected either up or down... Just got tired of guessing.. But I will say, I have only heard bad news from inside the company. And unless you're protected like I am, be careful around earnings report. Wonder if during this report they have to talk about any bad stuff happening between them and facebook. I hope they put all the cards out on the table once and for all.. I'm tired of them pretending things are good and being all secretive. Everyone has a right to know so they can invest with full info.
Premarket action was intense. Looked interesting, I don't know if it was short covering or legit buying.
But on the way up, I bought some $3.5 puts to secure my gains. Doesn't matter if we go up or down, I'm covered. Much better solution than selling or guessing.
Might as well be considered as little to no position, I have a 10k share position. And furthermore, I don't think anyone can short Zynga right now anyway, I doubt there are any shares to borrow.
I read that, I'm aware of their hire. I think it is no different than hiring John Schappert and Barry Cottle from EA to help them make midcore games. It didn't help.
They need actual dev staff from these companies too... and/or to make software acquisitions.
I meant that, but figured iHub would censor me, so I craftily changed it... same difference anyway.
Where did they hire someone to develop that product? So far they've hired a couple more execs. People don't realize that it is us engineers that are responsible for products being built, while the execs get paid big bucks flaunting their titles.
They should have already done it.. the only timeline is Zynga's snail pace in this regard. There are laws within europe and such, but honestly, there are so many ways Zynga could have done it.
They just never did.
somewhat risky way to serve the US customers:
They could establish a poker network in some country with no extradition treaty or diplomatic treaty with the US. Bhutan, Vanuatu ... etc.
Build a poker network there... build a digital base there, for digital currency transfers and such (not hard, since bitcoins is already there).
Then advertise the shit out of it on their site. It isn't a crime for Zynga to be an investor in such companies. That poker company could serve US customers and US legislation wouldn't play at all... Vanuatu is 0% tax too.
Many ideas man... at the very least they could have just gone after the non-US crowd, but they didn't. They doubled down on VILLE GAMES! Pisses me off more than anything.
You could do that, or you could also buy some puts then to protect the price...
That's absolutely true, and I know that as well. How much of that tech is web friendly? They will need to add all their tracking metrics into it, so they will need the source code. It will be a bit of a learning curve to edit someone else's source code. They will need to meticulously check each developer checkin to make sure they aren't introducing some bug that lets them cheat on poker later. The backend part will need to work on Zynga cloud... so that will require heavy modifications.
If you want to gamble, and you think Zynga will be up by december... buy some call options. But I can't tell you it will go up by then.. In this earning they might reveal that they lost a lot of money and earnings is still really bad, in which case this falls. Not to mention what happens in case of the class actions? Doesn't that happen in October?
I don't know if zynga will go up or down... so I can't say anything. But if you think it'll go up.. fastest approach to money is buying calls right now... you can also buy calls for 1 year from now... if you think you can wait for your returns.
Zynga backed off from Ongame long ago.
No, that was me... I don't think Zynga is on their deathbed. I think their games are. Everyone I've spoken to so far within the company says that. I have friends in the mobile platform division that say the platform will be late. The DAU is falling consistently. I can go on and on. Also the ville games aren't monetizing much anymore. As soon as I posted that though, I wanted to delete it, but yahoo didn't let me. I was just a bit ticked off at people talking nonsense on there without being able to back it up.
I've never pumped Zynga... don't plan to now especially since I know things about the company that I know to be true. I do think they have a shot at salvaging things with real money gambling, but only if they act soon. They're already behind on that front. The technology needed for rmg, they do not have. I know what their poker tech is all about, I wrote some of the code in that mess. It isn't code that would pass muster when real money is involved. So they will have to acquire tech/company. Maybe they're trying to acquire 888, that would be a boost to the company and be good for the stock. Maybe that's what is happening.
Do you know how far behind they're on mobile? A lot further than they would have you believe. Are they going to buy out GLU? GLU has a fair bit of crap on their books too, so that wouldn't be a good acquisition.
Let me put it this way, I don't expect the earnings in 2 weeks to be good. I expect it to be bad. Facebook spoke good about the company, but they also mentioned how they basically screwed Zynga over by turning off their virality. Do you know how much Zynga has to spend to acquire a user now? Know how many clicks it takes to get to farmville? These are not positive signs and I'm learning about some of these things just now... No matter what happens with the stock, I'm holding these shares for the long haul, but I'm sick of them making mistake after mistake.
On a positive note, I do think there could be a huge short squeeze that could take the stock up to 3.50+
Go for it :)
Except Oct 1st is earnings for Q3... I'm not going to have shares going into the earnings report. Hopefully it runs up till then.
The ask is at 0.05 on those tho..
Online gambling is no doubt a hotbed, but they don't have the technology for that yet. They will have to write a fair bit of stuff in order to get into that and they've not been moving fast enough on the dev front in that regard. But time will tell.
I am gonna say no further... I'm gonna just let Zynga move where it chooses to... If I had private messaging ability I'd have pm'd people instead... anyway.
I still have about a 10k holding in Zynga, I'm not selling that..
My apologies.. I'll say no more.
Hey, I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but I just heard from someone at Zynga that DAU and users are falling rapidly. I see the MAU up, but the DAU is down..
Also heard, the games business is dying fast that they really need to rethink things..
Take your profits right now ... and wait for it to settle in the $2.8 area... I'm only trying to minimize losses here..
I just know I wouldn't take the risk of holding this stock after earnings again. It'll probably see a rise leading up to earnings though.
link?