Social media company Reddit filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday after a yearslong run-up. The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.”
Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing.
The company said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared to a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior.
Its market debut, expected in March, will mark the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It’s the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019.
Reddit first filed a confidential draft of its public offering prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2021.
Better than a true “short” is to buy a put option on the stock for 100 shares. You buy a contract that lets you buy someone else shares at a lower price. If youre sure the stock is going to decrease, you pay a minor amount to make more money when it does.
You can then opt to exercise this and get cheap shares, or more likely, sell the put contract directly for profit.
You can also sell a call option that says you will provide 100 shares at a higher price. If you think the stock is going down, you will never have to actually fulfill this, so the money you made from selling the call is pure profit.
The positive with options is that they limit your losses if youre wrong, unlike shorting where technically your losses can be unlimited. Options are also easier to get into than shorts, which generally require specific brokers that have minimum account size.
The negative is that options are time limited. They last only a certain amount of time you specify when you buy. You can be 100% right about how the market will move, but if you get the timing wrong, you still lose money
I think this is what I had in mind when I said I would consider shorting RDDT. Gonna watch and see what happens with the IPO first, though.