There was a time, many years ago, that Netflix was this scrawny little small-cap stock of a firm that mailed DVDs to monthly subscribers. I was an early user of Netflix, and I absolutely loved it. (They are based here in the Bay Area). No one dared dream they would have a market cap of over $160 billion, as they do today. If you told someone ten years ago that Netflix would dwarf General Electric in terms of value, they would have laughed you right out of the room.
Although it’s a darling these days, six years ago, Netflix was absolute dog meat. They had introduced a product called Qwikster, which was considered the biggest product debacle since New Coke. By late summer of 2012, the stock had fallen 80%. Now just take a moment and consider that. Try to imagine, say, Amazon falling from 1844 to 377 in the span of a few months. On top of this, it’s not like they were in the throes of an economic meltdown. This was 2012, when the recover and QE fever were all the rage. So NFLX was garbage, and the news media reflected it: (more…)