Reddit went public on Thursday, after much anticipation and speculation. The IPO price was set at $34 per share and, by 4 p.m. ET, when the closing bell rang, it had risen and held steady, closing the day at $50.31 per share. That represented a nearly 50 percent increase.
Reddit is obviously an important website in the ecosystem of the online world. It has, however, never been a particularly profitable endeavor. In fact, in its 18 years of existence it has never turned a profit.
That fact, paired with a general distaste for Reddit's push for monetization, made the influential stock market subreddit r/wallstreetbets wager against Reddit. This is the subreddit that ballooned GameStop and other stocks, much to the chagrin of hedge funds betting against those companies. But r/wallstreetbets was deadset of shorting Reddit's stock, with lots of users believing its value was set way too high.
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To be fair, the $34 share price valued Reddit at $6.4 billion, which is...a lot of money. Though, before the share actually hit the market, indications were it could begin trading at around $50 per share. That was the case once the stock began trading in earnest.
Reddit, even if it isn't a giant of the Meta ilk, was seen as an important IPO in the finance world, Reuters reported.
"If Reddit trades poorly, it will cast a shadow over the IPO market. Many companies will hit pause on their IPO initiatives," Julian Klymochko, CEO of the investment firm Accelerate Financial Technologies, told the news service.
Still, an IPO has the word initial in it for a reason. This is just Day 1 of Reddit as a public company and there will be lots to come.
