Twitter Fritter v.3

sources: http://twitter.com, http://finance.yahoo.com

Twitter is on fire! Revenue for this quarter was $250 million and the net loss was $132 million. Compared the same quarter in 2013, they doubled their revenue and their expenses went up 5x! Woo Hoo!

The CEO was naturally crowing:

In a statement, Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo said, “We had a very strong first quarter. Revenue growth accelerated on a year over year basis fueled by increased engagement and user growth.”

Her left out the part about expense growth accelerating faster, but maybe he doesn't know what fueled the expense growth.

The stock price dropped about 10% after earnings were released, which is plain silly. I mean, if they can keep up this performance, the net loss for the year will be a mere half a billion dollars.

Again, I am tempted to extrapolate, but I want to give Twitter more chances to prove me wrong. Will they turn a quarterly profit for the first time in their history? Will their expenses grow less than their revenue next quarter? Tune in next time to the same bat channel to find out.

see also: Twitter Fritter v.1

Mean gap and Median gap

Almost 5 years after the end of the recession, with much fanfare about total employment reaching 2007 levels, mean and median duration of unemployment levels are still worse than the highest levels seen in the 1980s double dip recessions. Both measures seem to have stalled with little or no improvement in the last year or so. The mean gap, in particular, looks like the cruel gap.

Nasdaq a victim of gravity (Schoolhouse Rock)

The meltdown in biotechs and high tech firms with P/Es over 200 has been picking up momentum in the last couple of weeks. This is sort of how the 2000 stock meltdown started. This Schoolhouse Rock video captures the mood.

Peak SNAP?

The total number of people on SNAP has started to decline and the percentage of the US population receiving food stamp benefits appears to have peaked at 15.2% in March, 2013. Since then, it has declined to 14.7%. I don't look at data with a bullish bias, but this is a positive development. It is still very high by historical standards, but this is the first significant reversal in the SNAP program since the recession.