Author: Anthonette Clerigo

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Article: DoorDash Soars in IPO to $60 Billion Market Cap

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DoorDash Soars in IPO to $60 Billion Market Cap

Christiana Sciaudone, 09 December 2020

Investing.com — Doordash Inc (NYSE:DASH) is a smash hit. The food-delivery company opened trading at $182, a whopping 78% jump over the $102 at which it priced on Tuesday.

The company sold 33 million shares — originally marketed between $90 and $95 — on Tuesday to raise $3.37 billion in its initial public offering and now has a market value of about $60 billion.

DoorDash’s IPO is the third-largest in the U.S. this year, topped only by Bill Ackman’s $4 billion blank-check company and Snowflake Inc’s (NYSE:SNOW) $3.86 billion offering.
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Article: DoorDash IPO delivers billions to its Stanford founders

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DoorDash IPO delivers billions to its Stanford founders

Tom Maloney, 09 December 2020

Stanford University students Tony Xu, Andy Fang and Stanley Tang had a revelation seven years ago in a Palo Alto macaroon store.

The shop’s owner showed them pages and pages of delivery orders she hadn’t been able to fulfill. Demand wasn’t high enough to hire a full-time delivery person, but there was no way she could drop off all the orders herself. It was a story the three heard again and again as they worked to understand how they could leverage technology to help small businesses.

They decided to build a basic web page with menus from local restaurants to see if there was demand for a delivery business. “It was super simple, ugly, and honestly we weren’t really expecting anything,” Tang said at a Stanford lecture years later. “All of a sudden we got a phone call – someone called! They wanted to order Thai food.”
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Article: HAGENS BERMAN, NATIONAL TRIAL ATTORNEYS, Encourages MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

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HAGENS BERMAN, NATIONAL TRIAL ATTORNEYS, Encourages MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

Globe Newswire, 08 December 2020

The investigation centers on MultiPlan’s financial disclosures leading up to- and through- its merger and going public transaction with special purpose acquisition (“SPAC”) company Churchill Capital Corp. III. More specifically, Hagens Berman is investigating the company’s and its sponsor’s statements about MultiPlan’s client base and revenues. On Nov. 11, 2020, Muddy Waters Capital published a scathing report, “MultiPlan: Private Equity Necrophilia Meets The Great 2020 Money Grab,” based in part on its interviews of former MultiPlan executives.

Among other things, Muddy Waters observes: (1) the company and its sponsors concealed the impending loss of MultiPlan’s largest client (“UnitedHealthcare”, or “UHC”) due to UHC’s formation of a competitor (“Naviguard”) that offers significantly lower prices and fewer conflicts of interest; (2) MultiPlan’s financials “have been financially engineered to obscure the decay in its business;” and, (3) “[w]e understand that in 2018, MPLN released revenue reserves, dropping them from approximately 30% to 10% of revenue, which we believe enabled MPLN to show 2018 EBITDA growth amid shrinking sales.”
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Article: IBIO – don’t buy the vaccine dream

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IBIO – don’t buy the vaccine dream

mariner_admin, 08 December 2020

IBIO is a Texas-based company whose stock was up ~500% year to date through 12/7 on investor optimism about its COVID-19 vaccine efforts. We believe that IBIO is vaccine vaporware, with a history of having inserted itself into the discourse of several diseases-du-jour over the last decade including H1N1, Ebola, and now COVID. IBIO has never actually commercialized any of its vaccine or therapeutics efforts, having eliminated pipeline disclosure in FY17.

In fact, IBIO settled a shareholder suit alleging that it lied about its Ebola claims, and we believe IBIO’s COVID effort is just a replay of the 2014 Ebola episode. Despite this, the Roberts (Kay and Erwin), have reaped compensation in excess of 100% of IBIO’s revenues since 2008
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Article: DoorDash takes a hefty cut from restaurants, and risks losing them to cheaper options

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DoorDash takes a hefty cut from restaurants, and risks losing them to cheaper options

Ari Levy, 08 December 2020

Salvatore Reina owns three Francesca pizzerias in New Jersey that have been closed for indoor dining during the pandemic. While much of his industry turned to DoorDash, Reina resisted.

“Third parties take a big cut,” said Reina, who opened his first pizzeria 12 years ago, about 20 miles outside of New York City. “I’d rather spend those marketing dollars to get people directly.”

As DoorDash prepares for its public market debut, an offering that could value the delivery app service at over $30 billion, the San Francisco-based company has to show that it can make enough money on every order to turn into a profitable business. Meanwhile, investors have to consider how many restaurant owners will eventually turn away from apps like DoorDash because the costs are too high for their low-margin operations.
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Article: DOORDASH IPO HAS ITS SKEPTICS

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DOORDASH IPO HAS ITS SKEPTICS

Joe Guszkowski, 08 December 2020

Third-party delivery company DoorDash will set a share price for its initial public offering Tuesday, riding a wave of momentum that could bring it a valuation of more than $30 billion.

In the latest sign of demand for its stock, the company on Friday raised the price range for its shares to between $90 and $95, up from $75 to $85.

But not everyone shares that enthusiasm about the IPO. Some investors question the terms of the offering and the company’s readiness for the public market, while others believe its growth runway is shrinking.

On Monday, CtW Investment Group sent a letter to DoorDash’s board raising concerns about the IPO’s share structure and how the company characterized public reaction to a former tipping policy. CtW works with union-sponsored pension funds.
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Article: A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

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A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive

Sheelah Kolhatkar, 07 December 2020

In July, 2015, Patrick Byrne, the founder of the online discount retailer Overstock, delivered a twenty-minute talk at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas. Other speakers included the venture capitalist Peter Thiel; John Mackey, the chief executive officer of Whole Foods; and the Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

Byrne’s talk, entitled “Turtles All the Way Down: How the Crypto-Revolution Solves Intractable Problems on Wall Street,” was a version of one he had given many times before. It touched on several of his interests, including the kind of liberalism usually referred to as libertarianism, the flaws in the structure of the stock market which make it vulnerable to manipulation, and how a blockchain-based financial system could eliminate those flaws. After the talk, a line of people waited by the stage to speak to Byrne.
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Article: Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws

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Berman Tabacco Investigates OrthoPediatrics Corp. (KIDS) on Behalf of Investors Concerning Potential Violations of Federal Securities Laws

ACCESSWIRE, 03 December 2020

Berman Tabacco, a national law firm representing investors, is investigating potential violations of the federal securities laws by OrthoPediatrics Corp. (“OrthoPediatrics” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ:KIDS) and its officers and directors. OrthoPediatrics is a medical device company based in Warsaw, Indiana. The Company designs, develops, and commercializes orthopedic implants and instruments for children with orthopedic conditions. On December 2, 2020, Culper Research issued a report asserting that it believed that OrthoPediatrics “overstated revenues.” On this news, the Company’s common shares were trading down by as much as 13% on heavy volume.
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Article: DoorDash Gets a Bullish Rating and Price Target Before It Starts Trading

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DoorDash Gets a Bullish Rating and Price Target Before It Starts Trading

Rhian Hunt, 02 December 2020

Food delivery IPO DoorDash, rival to Grubhub (NYSE:GRUB) and other restaurant delivery services, attracted its first major analyst rating even before its shares are actually trading on the stock exchange. The news site Benzinga reported yesterday that investment banking, wealth management, and financial analysis firm D.A. Davidson rated the company as a buy and gave its stock a speculative price target of $93 per share.

Davidson analyst Tom White laid out a bull case for DoorDash based on several metrics, including its 2020 U.S. delivery market share of 50%. That is up from a 36% share at the year’s beginning and 17% two years ago. White also points out that the company still has lots of room for growth, providing service to just 6% of America’s population and handling 3% of off-premise restaurant sales (18 million customers and $8 billion in gross order value, respectively). The $93 price target represents a sixfold multiple of DoorDash’s enterprise-value-to-sales (EV/sales) ratio.
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Article: INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation

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INVESTOR ALERT: Kirby McInerney LLP Continues Investigation of Shareholder Claims Against MultiPlan Corporation

GLOBE NEWSWIRE, 01 December 2020

On November 11, 2020, Muddy Waters Research (“Muddy Waters”) released a report entitled “MultiPlan: Private Equity Necrophilia Meets The Great 2020 Money Grab.” Among other issues, the Muddy Waters report asserted that Multiplan is “in financial decline, and its financial statements were engineered to obscure this existing deterioration” and that the Company “is in the process of losing its largest client, UnitedHealthcare (‘UHC’),” which “has formed a competitor to MPLN that offers significantly lower prices and fewer conflicts of interest.” On this news, Multiplan’s stock price fell $1.72 per share, or 19.7%, to close at $7.01 per share on November 11, 2020.
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Article: DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions

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DoorDash: great unit economics, but many unanswered questions

Daniel McCarthy, 01 December 2020

A lot of people have a lot of different opinions about DoorDash in light of their pre-IPO S-1 filing. Many reporters and pundits are concerned about profitability in the restaurant meal delivery category as a whole, wondering whether any of these firms could ever sustainably turn a profit. Many others are more optimistic, pointing to some of the (many) customer-related disclosures that DASH scattered throughout its S-1. And of course, all of this uncertainty is only further compounded by COVID, which was and has continued to be a big shot in the arm for everyone in the category, but introduces yet more uncertainty about how the world will look post-pandemic.

Given my own academic research with Elliot Oblander and Kivan Polimis into the industry, which I will hopefully be able to link to over the next couple of months (if you’re interested, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure send it to you as soon as it breaks!), and given the volume of disclosures that DoorDash provided in the S-1, I took a closer look at the company to uncover what its underlying unit economic condition currently looks like, how COVID has impacted it, and what their “normalized” economics may be after stripping out pandemic-driven behavioral changes.
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Article: Palantir Technologies inc PLTR: A fraud since 2003?

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Palantir Technologies inc PLTR: A fraud since 2003?

MMa2019, 25 November 2020

Palantir has not made a profit since 2003. It is a software company that offers a product called ”Gotham” for the defense and intelligence sector, another product called ”Foundry” sold to the private sector. Both products run on a SaaS infrastructure called Apollo and use Amazon’s web services (AWS) as their PaaS. In 2015, during a promotion tour for his book “Zero to One”, Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir explains to the audience that one should be wary of “buzz words”:
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Article: MPLN SECURITIES FRAUD INVESTIGATION: Hagens Berman, National Trial Attorneys, Alerts MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys Now, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

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MPLN SECURITIES FRAUD INVESTIGATION: Hagens Berman, National Trial Attorneys, Alerts MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys Now, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

Newsfile Corp., 18 November 2020

The investigation centers on MultiPlan’s financial disclosures leading up to- and through- its merger and going public transaction with special purpose acquisition (“SPAC”) company Churchill Capital Corp. III. More specifically, Hagens Berman is investigating the company’s and its sponsor’s statements about MultiPlan’s client base and revenues. On Nov. 11, 2020, Muddy Waters Capital published a scathing report, “MultiPlan: Private Equity Necrophilia Meets The Great 2020 Money Grab,” based in part on its interviews of former MultiPlan executives.

Among other things, Muddy Waters observes: (1) the company and its sponsors concealed the impending loss of MultiPlan’s largest client (“UnitedHealthcare”, or “UHC”) due to UHC’s formation of a competitor (“Naviguard”) that offers significantly lower prices and fewer conflicts of interest; (2) MultiPlan’s financials “have been financially engineered to obscure the decay in its business;” and, (3) “[w]e understand that in 2018, MPLN released revenue reserves, dropping them from approximately 30% to 10% of revenue, which we believe enabled MPLN to show 2018 EBITDA growth amid shrinking sales.”
Continue reading “Article: MPLN SECURITIES FRAUD INVESTIGATION: Hagens Berman, National Trial Attorneys, Alerts MultiPlan (MPLN) Investors with Losses to Contact Its Attorneys Now, Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud”

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Article: 4 Things to Know From DoorDash’s IPO Filing

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4 Things to Know From DoorDash’s IPO Filing

Evan Niu, 17 November 2020

DoorDash has at long last filed the public version of its S-1 Registration Statement with the SEC, nearly nine months after submitting a confidential version to the SEC. The leading food delivery platform has opened its books for prospective investors ahead of going public through an IPO. The upcoming debut comes as Grubhub (NYSE: GRUB) is preparing to be acquired by Just Eat Takeaway. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “DASH.”
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Article: DoorDash delivers an IPO filing

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DoorDash delivers an IPO filing

Robinhood Snacks, 16 November 2020

Drooling all over the S-1… DoorDash released its IPO paperwork on Friday, and didn’t hold back with the high-res food pics (so many poke bowls). Companies that are going public have to file a prospectus with the SEC so investors can get informed. Here’s what DoorDash delivered:

#1 food deliverer in the US: DoorDash has an enviable 50% share of the market. Uber Eats has 26%, Grubhub has 16%, and Postmates (which Uber’s buying) has 7%.
Sales more than tripled to $1.9B from January to September compared to the same period in 2019. 18M customers, 1M Dashers, and 390K merchants now use DoorDash’s platform.
It’s still not profitable. Buuuut: DoorDash significantly cut its net loss from $533M in the 2019 period to $149M in 2020.
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