Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of May 7, 2019

Article Excerpt

A notable event in stock-market history is scheduled to take place in less than a week. It could be a game-changer for the brokerage industry, and may even change our view on investing in new stock issues (Initial Public Offerings, or IPOs). Slack Technologies Inc. is a fast-growing workplace communications platform. It started out in 2009 as Tiny Speck, a gaming company. It later dropped its original business model and switched to a new model—one based on a business-messaging software platform that it had developed for internal use. The company and the software are now both named Slack (an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”). The new company launched in August 2013, financed with venture capital. In October 2014, 14 months later, Slack achieved “unicorn status”—that is, it reached a valuation of more than $1 billion while still a private company. That month, it raised $120 million from venture-capital investors, based on a company valuation of $1.2 billion. (All…