I suppose it depends on who you are trying to please. If you are Twitter, it's a major loss.

If you give a shit about bankers (most of us do not), then you win.

But the bankers come up with those magical "buy/hold/sell" recommendations that everyone else listens to and panic-sells when their advice says so. Or "oops, they missed our magically predicted revenue by one penny per share". It's all part of the game.

Sell side analyst recommendations are a complete joke. They are basically trailing indicators (i.e. price drops and then the sell recommendations come out). I don't think anyone takes them seriously.

I saw an interesting article about GOOG recently that had explicit instructions about where to buy/sell and how long to hold. I laughed.

Which says to me that bankers are probably still holding a lot of TWTR. If that doesn't change short-term, it could poison the social network.

I believe going public poisons any company. CEOs change their vision from long-term to insanely short-term. Gotta make those quarterly numbers or they're screwed.

There have been a few exceptions to this, Apple being the most famous one. Facebook was on the same track but the SEC rules about share ownership forced their hand.

Amazon has pretty weird numbers, and is public.

I think Amazon is another outlier, as we've already discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591112

Notable pull quote: "It's important to note that if any other company spent until their EPS was negative, investors would /flip/. Amazon is playing with razor thin margins while trying to scale up a platform to end all platforms that we might someday use for everything without thinking about it."

So again, like Apple and Facebook, everyone knows the CEO is playing the long game and doesn't give a crap what the stock price is.

It depends on who holds the stock, and how they're voting. That's pretty clear. When bankers buy a company anticipating a highly profitable return via their models and slam that expectation into the leadership like a floppy do... you know what happens.