Daily Price Movement / General Discussion, page-28203

I'm as cynical as the best of them with this company but your write-up is a bit dire:
- Larry's stock is loaned out till April 2022 I believe, and if he hadn't loaned them they would have had to just source the $100m equivalent from elsewhere. I agree that for a company under prolonged short attacks, not a great look for the CEO, however it's 100% connected to the delta placement and not 'general' lending for short selling as such.

- Market-wide sell-offs can and will happen, but whilst it's important to be aware, there's nothing you can do to control that. Also so long as interest rates stay in the toilet, sell-offs are more likely to be shallow and short-lived. Even when rates start to rise in late 2022 or 2023, given the massive amounts of debt in the system, they can barely move much more than 1% - 2% before everything comes to a grinding halt. Agree that if your growth stock is trading at say 50x revenue when the rates start to go up there will be pressure, but being overvalued isn't a concern here.

- The acceleration of consolidation and major deals has definitely put a bit of a timer on the other BNPL players, but it's more like several months to a year, as opposed to several weeks. Remembering that in the US the only major partnerships so far are Affirm with Walmart, Shopify and Amazon (they're f*cking killing it with these) and Sezzle with Target. No others. Klarna and Afterpay haven't bagged one yet either. It's still so early in the US it's not even funny. You probably watched that Bloomberg interview with Adam Ezra yesterday, but it's fascinating to see the US commentators talk about BNPL as if they're just discovering it - what is is, how it works, the value for customers/merchants, the super growth rates etc - to us that sounds ridiculous because it's mainstream here, but for them it's like it's all brand new. Pretty much exactly as the BNPL execs said it would, the US was a couple of years behind and is now rapidly catching up.

- For me as long as the underlying asset is going strong, a deal or partnership will happen here whether LD/PG want it to or not. They've managed to cut deals in Australia with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, eBay and all the major retailers. Clearly they know how to do it. US market obviously massively larger and with some differences, but Zip has shown in the past they can bag large deals.

The near daily attention on BNPL in the US is perfect - every large company in the credit, banking, payments and fintech space will be looking at these developments. Zip is now only 1 of 2 companies in the Top 5 US pure-play BNPL space left easily (and affordably) available for a major deal. As I've said before, the deal doesn't have to include LD/PG if the acquirer doesn't want it to - there's an easy way and a hard way to get Zip to partner/merge with another entity, but a deal is going to get done here sooner or later.