>The downdraft began in mid-August, when the S&P 500 plunged 11 percent in a week, due primarily to concerns about slowing growth in China. Even with public stocks regaining most of their losses, IPOs remained weak, with tech companies going public at the slowest rate since 2009, and most of those that hit the market failing to reward late-stage investors.
> High-profile consumer start-ups are feeling the pinch. Evernote and One Kings Lane are cutting staff, Rdio was acquired out of bankruptcy, Gilt Groupe is nearing a sale for a fraction of its peak valuation (according to The Wall Street Journal) and Dropbox shut down two products.
The place where cheap money flows is early and late stage. Rdio being acquired and Dropbox have unrelated problems. Rdio's inception / funding was unorthodox by sv standards and the Skype founders finally realized they probably weren't going to beat skype, so they cut their losses. Dropbox killed 2 products that it failed to successfully integrate.
This piece seems light on evidence. I'm not saying that the situation we've had over the last 3-5 years is not coming to an end, I just don't see this piece proving it any more than last year or the year before.
Folks have been calling "bubble" for years, and if interest rates rise it could be a spark to change things, but this piece doesn't add very much data to the conversation and instead relies on VC hearsay.
tl;dr: Wall Street is pissed that their jobs are being replaced by bots.
Considering the frequency and regularity of reports like these in main stream media, this smells a lot like good ol' fashioned market manipulate. I would be interested to see some analysis on who consistently acts on the dips resulting from myopic media reporting.
How can you make money trading on a market whose volatility can't be manipulated by artificially limiting the supply of raw materials? Create panic, hedge against the drop, buy on the dip, cash after the correction.
The perceptions of investors are a hell of a lot easier to change than the actual markets themselves. It wouldn't be the first time the media was used to commit securities fraud.
This is a fluff piece based mostly on rumour, opinion, and anecdata. There's little substantive evidence and reasoning.
What I found particularly egregious was the use of a line graph that showed VC investment generally rising to $50.8 billion in 2014 and then dipping to $47.2 billion in 2015. An explanatory sentence below reads "U.S. start-ups raised $47.2 billion in the first three quarters of 2015, following $50.8 billion in all of 2014, by far the most since 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association." There's no dip thus far. If we project through the fourth quarter of 2015, we can expect a total of about $63 billion in 2015. This is no dip, but yet another record-breaking year.
Sure, the record-breaking years are bound to eventually come to an end, but that isn't news. The baseline of vc investment activity has been raised a great deal, probably permanently.