How’s this for a happy Thanksgiving present? Groupon’s stock price sunk Wednesday to the lowest point since its initial public offering earlier this month: closing at $ 16.96 a share, well below its $ 20 IPO share price. Earlier in the day, Groupon’s share price hit $ 16.71, the lowest point in its short history — a 46 percent drop from the $ 31.14 price it reached the day it hit the stock market on Nov. 4:
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To be fair, the entire stock market has slumped in recent days: The NASDAQ composite index is now down 8.16 percent from where it was two and a half weeks ago, and the Dow Jones Industrial Index went down by 7.37 percent during that same period. But Groupon’s decline — by the end of Wednesday it was down 30 percent from Nov. 14 — outpaced both of those metrics significantly:
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As we’ve written before, monitoring the ups and downs of daily stock price changes is a bit of a horse race — and it’s also antithetical to the supposed purpose of the stock market, which is to allow companies to build toward long-term health and stability. But many folks in the tech and finance fields have been critical of Groupon’s valuation ever since it laid out specific plans to go public back in June, so there’s naturally buzz (and a healthy bit of schadenfreude) around its dramatic market cap decline. It’s important to remember, though, that while Groupon’s plummeting share price is certainly notable at the moment, now that it’s a publicly traded company it won’t be possible to truly judge whether it’s a stock market success or failure until it can be evaluated with a much longer lens.
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