The message for investors from Uber’s flop IPO

Uber’s IPO has been a disaster. That suggests private markets are even more exuberant than public ones.

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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi
(Image credit: © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP)

Uber, the minicab-booking app, went public last week. Uber is a loss-making company, with major question marks hanging over both its future growth rate and its prospects of ever turning a profit. The company has plenty of "blue sky" visions of running electric, robot car fleets and building up a trucking division and logistics empire. But for the moment, it's really just a software platform that connects consumers with drivers, allowing both sides to skirt local taxi licensing laws while also dancing delicately around grey areas of employment law.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.