It looks like the Snap bears got it right—at least for the moment.
Shares of Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc. (SNAP), dipped nearly 5% in trading Thursday, sending Snap shares to its initial public offering price of $17 a share for the first time since the company went public in March. The dip also sent Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s net worth down roughly $46 million to $3.9 billion, according to Bloomberg data, since Spiegel’s fortune is largely tied to his stock holdings in the company.
That means even in a best-case scenario, Snap investors will have received 0% back on their investment so far. In fact, if they decided to buy into the hype at Snap’s all-time high price of $29.44 in March, the investor would have lost 42% on their investment.
Since its IPO, Snap’s market cap has shed about $8.1 billion, giving the company a value of about $20.2 billion.
The decline highlights the growing doubt in the company’s ability to win new users—a suspicion that has lurked among investors since the company first announced its intention to go public earlier this year. Investors were mainly concerned that Snap had yet to turn a profit. And the company’s first earnings report since going public only strengthened their case: Instead of showing improvement, Snap revealed that user growth had slowed, while revenue had fallen short of expectations.
There’s likely more good news to come for Snap’s bears or doubters, who have bet some $1.1 billion that the stock price will fall, according to S3 Partners. The stock’s lockup period, which prevents insiders from selling stock for a period of time, is expected to expire starting at the end of July and continue through August. That will make an additional 84% of Snap’s outstanding shares available, at least in theory, for trading on the market, according to a client note J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth sent in May.
Granted, its not unheard of for shares of hyped up tech companies to dip below their IPO price. Facebook, for example, opened to public markets at a price of $38 a share. After a disastrous start, shares of Facebook didn’t recover to that price for over a year.
The tech sector in general has been falling in recent days, sparking worry that investors have poured too much too fast into such companies.
