Twitter is toast

Analysts finally start speaking like Fudzilla

It has taken a while, but we are finally getting analysts to describe situations in the way we do. Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research shocked the market when he described Twitter as being “toast”.

We would have liked it better had he added Twitter was now the Norwegian Blue of the tech world but we can’t have everything.

Chowdhry’s comment followed chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”. Meanwhile Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both exits were announced on the same day.

Last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.

Chowdhry said that many Twitter investors were foolishly building an investment thesis based on complete stupidity. The company was toast and not worth $ 10 a share, he added.

A $ 10 price tag would represent a more than 44 percent decline in the US technology company’s shares on Tuesday’s closing price.

He said Twitter’s data quality was “horrible”. Many pollsters used Twitter data to predict a Hillary Clinton win in the US election but the fact that Donald Trump won shows that data quality is poor. This was because Twitter allowed too many fake users on the platform, Chowdhry claims.

“If data quality is bad, ad targeting is bad, and if ad targeting is bad, advertisers are not happy, and hence monetisation will remain challenging for Twitter,” Chowdhry said.

Twitter’s average monthly active users for the third quarter increased to 317 million, up for million from its second quarter, while earnings beat market expectations. The US social media giant also announced plans to lay off about 350 people, or nine percent of its global workforce.