My father was an accountant and understood their product, but believed it would still be a hard market as others do offer other similar online products, although XRO is way ahead, those others already have a large customer base.

BFW choose an very unusual way to list which caused it to be undersubscribed, and cost it a lot in the process, but I eat there every so often and believe that they too have a competitive advantage in a very competitive market. Roberts used to run Redbull and turned that from a $10m revenue business to over $200m if my memory serves me well.

Now since listing XRO went to 1.15 down to 70 and is now at 93(13 months at 9 months it was 75). BFW went from 1.00 to 0.37, and now at 0.50 (9 months).

To date I wouldn’t have considered XRO or BFW a success they have both traded below issue price and are burning all the cash they received from their IPOs, as you would expect, they are both growth companies.

The thing is, most investors who bought XRO were recommeneded it by the brokers, and advising community, when it dropped their advisors would not have sold off, as they are experienced and would have provided (hopefully) good advise, and said it was a growth stock.

BFW on the other hand has shareholders who don’t use advisors, don’t normally invest and don’t have the experience to make good decisions when they risky growth stock they chose halves in (perceived) value because of illiquidity.

XRO has announced massive increases in customers, BFW has announced ambitious plans for a launch into Dubai. Both of these are positive for both companies.

My thinking is I still eat at BFW, and I still see others doing it to. If they succeed there will be good revenue upside, and when these positive announcements happen who is going to buy the share? Everyone, because currently just like you, nobody owns the share, as no one was advised to buy it.

I don’t think you can write off or promote either as an utter failure or success when both are currently trading at a paper loss.

It’s all very well highlighting Diligent’s NZX failure, but you hyped them up when their IPO was announced. You’ve suggested in this post that you had concerns with their IPO, yet at the time you said “It’s a very good thing – a stable mate for Xero”. If you had genuine concerns then why not highlight them at the time?