I should have taken my losses on Fitbit the first time the company disappointed me, which was back when they were trying to price that secondary at a multiple of today’s stock price. Over the last few quarters while I’ve owned this stock that basically went straight down since I bought it, I’ve made excuses for the company’s inability to please Wall Street thinking that the company would eventually become the de facto standard for fitness wearables, an industry that will be growing tremendously for many years to come.
But Fitbit failed to innovate fast enough (or at all?) to move the bar. I thought the company would have leveraged its sizable first move advantage in the fitness wearable industry to have delivered new kinds of wearables that athletes would be putting on their equipment, on their jerseys, on their shoes, on their skin….and data collecting and analysis and applying deep learning to that data…
Instead, we’re looking at company that’s basically being beaten on the top end by Apple and Samsung wearable watches and on the bottom end by silly Chinese-made and/or Brett Favre-peddled knockoffs.
Revenues won’t come close to estimates any time soon. Margins are down. I feel like an idiot for ever having bought this stock. I’m disappointed with Fitbit’s management and how badly they’ve executed, but I’m more disappointed with myself for not having been disciplined enough to take the losses a long time ago.
I’m going to go ahead and move on from my Fitbit long now and lick my wounds. Mea culpa for this one.