Sunday 11 August 2013

From Hero to Zero and back to Hero again

Investors who invested in this share surely were not too happy about the performance, being down 99%:



More happy faces for the following share, a 100-fold rise in share price:




But the remarkable thing ...... it is the share graph of one and the same company, Priceline! Amazing story, Business Insider has the story (see below) and here is the full graph of PCLN.


Way back in the 1990s, this company was the hype machine to end all hype machines.

It went public in a massive IPO, and its stock valuation immediately shot up to nearly $50 billion.

But then the numbers collapsed.

And so did the hype.

And so did the stock.

And so did the company.

A couple of years after the peak of the dot-com boom, the company's stock had fallen 99%. And the company itself had been left for dead.

But then an amazing thing happened.

The company found a management team that was less interested in "buzz" and "ideas" and "stories" than it was in actual performance.

The company stabilized its business, and then went looking for a new growth engine.

And found it.

And, now, a decade later, with shockingly little fanfare, the company's value is about to exceed the level it hit back in the wild dotcom days.

The company, in other words, is about to be worth $50 billion again.

The company is located, of all places, in... Norwalk, Connecticut.

The company is, of course, Priceline.

And its CEO, Jeff Boyd, is so press shy that you've probably never heard of him.

A $50 billion company!

In Norwalk, Connecticut!

That almost no one ever talks about!

If ever you needed proof that, over the long haul, perception is NOT reality, reality is reality,

Priceline is it.

Congratulations to Jeff Boyd and the rest of the team at Priceline. What a remarkable success story.

No comments:

Post a Comment