Icon death watch

Cirrus is owned by the Chinese now. ROI was probably decent but the investors weren’t hanging around waiting for natural growth to pay them back. They bailed at the first sign of fast cash.

As far as why investors jump into these things, first many have the money to lose. They know the risk level and this is just play money at the casino for them.

Secondly have you SEEN the crap with horrible financials that people will invest in, in the modern market, just because whatever the company makes fancies the investors? They’ll convince themselves that profits are “just one more year away” right into the bankruptcy where only the Founder’s shares are paid back by the buy out deal.

The new company could send them a 5% off coupon on the product and they’d be happy they lost money on the whole thing.

And even institutional investors buy these garbage companies. The “safety” of mutual funds is a lie if they do, too.

Watch carefully what your fund managers buy. They are desperate for growth numbers and they’ll pick any old valueless crap to stuff your portfolio with. Stuff that selling off the assets won’t even pay back single digit percentages of the investors.

Some are banking on popularity to force the government into more free loans/bailouts in certain sectors. There’s less and less connection to the balance sheets when they’re digging hard for growth that may or may not happen buying the stocks of companies that are flat out bankrupt already on the books.

“Someone will come save them. They’re too popular to die.”

Not really a thing much in aviation outside of airliner manufacturing, but in other sectors? Whoooo boy. Lots of bankruptcies awaiting the next market downturn outside of the traditional “value” investors.

The only good news is, we’ve completely proven that the majority of the masses of fund managers don’t beat index funds in the long term. We can all get smashed or profit together. And the market is so stuffed with retirement money that can’t be easily withdrawn, we all will.

Losers won’t always lose anymore, because Congress has to act when Dad and Mom’s retirement money is at stake and Congress themselves made it impossible to exit. (Well, investors could move to cash inside retirement vehicles but most aren’t that investment savvy.)

Incentives to retirement savings come with an unwritten mandate to not allow anything but mass volatility. Large cap volatiles in a particular sector are rescued. GM should be dead. AIG should be dead. Numerous banks should be dead (Wells Fargo many times over for their criminal culture...), etc.

Lehmann was the last one they put out to pasture the old fashioned way, forced liquidation with a gun to their heads. Oh a few small banks also got that treatment, but in terms of big well known names...

After that, the rules changed. Popularity beats balance sheets now. Profit isn’t always required as long as the product is popular. Or seen as necessary.

Not sure we’re close to being back to no-income-proof mortgages yet, but we’re happy to go the other direction... any income approved for a mortgage you can’t possibly pay back in any reasonable time that’s way above 25% of take home. Just make the number bigger if you can’t make the pool of customers bigger.

Chosen as an example of product popularity and pushing margins as tight as possible, even requiring government guarantees up front along with private insurance paid by every non-conforming loan customer but in some cases, throughout the life of the loan, even if it becomes conforming by being laid down or housing prices rising causing equity to rise.

Standard P&L math was never the whole story of a company, but it’s become less and less valued by a great many. It’s very rare for anyone touting value investing to be seen talking about it much in air time on outlets like CNBC, etc... as compared to a couple of decades ago. They’re considered “stodgy”.

My current favorite for a crash and burn is WeWork and other shared office space providers. Their valuation is in the billions. They have signed long term leases for millions of square feet, and spent huge amounts of money purposing the space with high end amenities.

There are at least a dozen companies engaged in this business model, with enormous exposure.

Their clients sign short term leases, leaving all of the risk on the lessor when the economy slows down, which, at some point, will happen.
 
But a company that keeps going back to the capital markets, especially one that keeps diluting the equity of its early investors, or over-leverages itself with debt, when it is not growing rapidly enough means it is not earning at least its cost of capital (even while it reports operating profits). That is not a sustainable business. Some day Tesla will be a HBS MBA program case study of exactly this.

Heretic!

:D
 
My question is, if you get laid off, were you really a "team member," or just an employee? :skeptical:

“One big family...”

Or so they told me until they cut 400 out of 500 at my startup a month before Christmas.

Can laugh about it... now. :)
 
Yeah they're getting eviscerated on glassdoor.. although that's to be expected after you fire half the company

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"Icon's original business plan envisioned 10 A5s rolling out the factory door each month."

Which would have been a totally realistic expectation, with their original projected (fantasized?) price tag. Bump the price tag up by $200K or so, and your sales drop off a bit. Imagine. Too bad they don't teach that kind of stuff in Econ 101. Oh... wait.
 
My current favorite for a crash and burn is WeWork and other shared office space providers. Their valuation is in the billions. They have signed long term leases for millions of square feet, and spent huge amounts of money purposing the space with high end amenities.

There are at least a dozen companies engaged in this business model, with enormous exposure.

Their clients sign short term leases, leaving all of the risk on the lessor when the economy slows down, which, at some point, will happen.
Without a doubt. There's a WeWork across the street from my office building. It would be one thing if they actually owned property, but like you say they just hold long term leases in swanky areas. It's not particularly recession proof at all. The hip, small tech incubator business model is well worn.
 
Without a doubt. There's a WeWork across the street from my office building. It would be one thing if they actually owned property, but like you say they just hold long term leases in swanky areas. It's not particularly recession proof at all. The hip, small tech incubator business model is well worn.

How busy/full are they?
 
How busy/full are they?
Not very. The ground floor looks like an empty Starbucks with a few folks milling around. I don't know about the other floor(s). They have their sign on the 10 story building but I don't think they lease all of the floors.
 
"Icon's original business plan envisioned 10 A5s rolling out the factory door each month."

Which would have been a totally realistic expectation, with their original projected (fantasized?) price tag. Bump the price tag up by $200K or so, and your sales drop off a bit. Imagine. Too bad they don't teach that kind of stuff in Econ 101. Oh... wait.

Forecasts are just that. Forecasts. And the financial models used to raise capital have to show rapid growth and good margins; so that drives the input assumptions. "It all looked good on paper". :dunno:

It sounds as though Icon has a more acute version of what Tesla has been wrestling with. A bunch of tech entrepreneurs, focussed on the technology, and able to raise funds on the basis of producing a "technologically advanced" product (which Silicon Valley VC doesn't require that as part of the pitch?). Unfortunately, the nuts and bolts of production and dealing with "on the factory floor" issues in the manufacturing plant require more than the latest scheduling software and ambitions of future robots. And, with the exception of poor interior fitting, there is absolutely no room for product quality problems when building an airplane.

That Cirrus was able to manage the ramp to ~750 planes in a year, and survive the crash back down to 1/3 of that almost overnight, is a credit to their ability to deal with exactly this issue.
 
WeWork charges an exorbitant fee to rent space in "their" buildings. They're really just an arbitrage play. Most of their business is to other startups. Just give it time...
 
WeWork charges an exorbitant fee to rent space in "their" buildings. They're really just an arbitrage play. Most of their business is to other startups. Just give it time...

WeWork just played to the prevailing meme in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Whether its Uber, Lyft, Airbnb or a host of other start-ups, the pitch is the company is "creating value" by using assets it does not own, and labor that are not employees (the contractor myth), and charge a fee to arbitrage "underutilized assets" with its software application. This "asset light" business model has been all the rage. :idea: Most of these companies will never make a dime for most of their investors, but they keep going by promoting the "scale opportunity". :rofl:
 
Forecasts are just that. Forecasts. And the financial models used to raise capital have to show rapid growth and good margins; so that drives the input assumptions. "It all looked good on paper". :dunno:
Right. The problem comes when you forecast being able to sell 120 planes a year at, say, $150K (their original announced proposed forecast price was, I think, actually a little lower than that); then incrementally raise the price to over 250% of that, but don't lower your forecast of sales. The result is easy to forecast.
 
WeWork just played to the prevailing meme in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Whether its Uber, Lyft, Airbnb or a host of other start-ups, the pitch is the company is "creating value" by using assets it does not own, and labor that are not employees (the contractor myth), and charge a fee to arbitrage "underutilized assets" with its software application. This "asset light" business model has been all the rage. :idea: Most of these companies will never make a dime for most of their investors, but they keep going by promoting the "scale opportunity". :rofl:

I wonder how they got SoftBank to give them billions...?

I keep thinking “I must be missing something...” “SoftBank must not be total morons.... right!?” :)
 
I wonder how they got SoftBank to give them billions...?

I keep thinking “I must be missing something...” “SoftBank must not be total morons.... right!?” :)

SoftBank invests in T-Mobile who’s got no spectrum and no hope of ever catching Verizon or AT&T ... ever.

But they can fill in the crap cheap city only market and steal scraps forever.

So is it good business or bad business? Hell if I know but T-Mobile is making Jon Legere as much money as he stole from Global Crossing and all he has to do is pretend Magenta is a cool color. LOL.
 
My top future "gee, how did that happen" tank stock is Tractor Supply (TSCO)... Every time I go in, they don't have what I need (basic stuff), and, there are no to little customers. We have one every 12 miles and I live in New England, not exactly "Farm Country"... They seem to have good margins, but...
 
My top future "gee, how did that happen" tank stock is Tractor Supply (TSCO)... Every time I go in, they don't have what I need (basic stuff), and, there are no to little customers. We have one every 12 miles and I live in New England, not exactly "Farm Country"... They seem to have good margins, but...
TSC is safe. That’s where I get food for my dog and a surprising number of things for my RV-14. I live in farm country but it took an oil boom to get a TSC. Go figure.

Icon raising the price and having a sales agreement that basically makes the plane a very front-loaded and expensive rental sticks out to me as the real death knell for the company.
 
My top future "gee, how did that happen" tank stock is Tractor Supply (TSCO)... Every time I go in, they don't have what I need (basic stuff), and, there are no to little customers. We have one every 12 miles and I live in New England, not exactly "Farm Country"... They seem to have good margins, but...

They do a lot of online business actually. Which is odd. But whatever works.
 
WeWork just played to the prevailing meme in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Whether its Uber, Lyft, Airbnb or a host of other start-ups, the pitch is the company is "creating value" by using assets it does not own, and labor that are not employees (the contractor myth), and charge a fee to arbitrage "underutilized assets" with its software application. This "asset light" business model has been all the rage. :idea: Most of these companies will never make a dime for most of their investors, but they keep going by promoting the "scale opportunity". :rofl:

The wework CEO said they’re different than Uber. I agree. Uber doesn’t enter into long term agreements with their drivers!

Unfortunately, I’m guessing there won’t be enough float to safely short their stock in September when they IPO and options will probably be too expensive.
 
The wework CEO said they’re different than Uber. I agree. Uber doesn’t enter into long term agreements with their drivers!

Unfortunately, I’m guessing there won’t be enough float to safely short their stock in September when they IPO and options will probably be too expensive.

Unless they have a mutual termination for convenience clause as an out in their lease.
 
Profit & Loss statement.

Personally, I think Accounting 101 should be required for all high school seniors in order to graduate.

Well, at least a personal finance class. I dunno about full-blown accounting. Most people don’t need to know about how a balance sheet, cash flow, income statement, etc are interrelated. Many will never even look at trial balance. Most will apply for auto/home loans, participate in 401K plans, purchase various insurances, and deal with credit card debt/credit scores. A personal finance course would at least be a decent foundation for major life decisions.
 
I'm hopeful that the WeWork trend for companies simply morphs into them realizing they don't need major office space at all and everyone can work from home. Luckily I just found another 100% remote job, so I still don't have to go into an office, unless one of our customers wants to pay for the privilege.
 
I'm hopeful that the WeWork trend for companies simply morphs into them realizing they don't need major office space at all and everyone can work from home. Luckily I just found another 100% remote job, so I still don't have to go into an office, unless one of our customers wants to pay for the privilege.
Same here, we just massively downsized our office by a factor of almost four.. it's awesome
 
I guess that's what is meant by the term "hard water"! ;)
 
What kind of gear up/down indicator does the Icon have? Lights? Verbal warning, like "Gear up for water landing"?
 
Man they just can't seem to get it right. They should put two huge "easy" buttons on the panel, one named water landing the other land!
 
There’s a design benefit to the Icon - you can gear up and not have a prop strike - brilliant!
 
Just so that folks know the current standing, this is from ICON's website: The ICON A5 comes fully equipped at $389,000 MSRP.
Yes, that first number is a three. Round it up, four hundred thousand dollars. About enough to buy a Lake, and a lake house.
 
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