Twitter’s Stock Stops Falling

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 3:40PM EST · Published Jan 22, 8:06AM EST

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Twitter’s Stock Stops Falling — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”625445″ placement=”ros”]After a great deal of ups and downs, which have been mostly downs, Twitter’s (NYSE: TWTR) shares have stabilized. They are flat for the year, The period during which Twitter shares surged due to buyout activity are month’s past. The shares appear to have settled to the point where they will trade on earnings rather than speculation. They trade at $16,58

Twitter has had another windfall of visibility as the Trump inauguration, his recent tweets, and more tweets from protesters who numbers in the millions across the country. Twitter’s most vexing problem, despite the activity, continues to be that marketers have not been able to turn this activity into successful advertising campaigns. The worry about the company is that this progress will never happen.

Twitter’s expected earnings figures have already disappointed Wall St. based on the company’s full year 2016 forecast:

For full year 2016, Twitter expects:
• Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $700 to $715 million;
• Adjusted EBITDA margin on GAAP revenue to be 27.5% to 28%; and
• Capital expenditures to be no more than $360 million.

[nativounit]

Twitter’s lack of ambition to expand beyond the tweet business has also been an issue. According to Barron’s

Twitter’s ambitions continue to shrink. The latest evidence is the company’s decision this week to sell software designed to help mobile app developers.

Twitter is selling its software toolkit Fabric to Alphabet, the owner of Google, for an undisclosed sum. Fabric launched in 2014, and Twitter had planned to use it to build relationships with mobile app developers. The hope was those developers would build products that interact with Twitter, and possibly broaden its uses and audience.

Twitter, it seems, hardly has any ambition at all.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.