In today’s early trading, 3D printing giant Stratasys saw their stock price dip down as low as USD$15.95 per share, a record low.
In fact, the company’s stock price has been struggling in recent days, along with other 3D printing stocks.
To get an idea of what’s going on, check out the slope of this Stratasys (SSYS) stock price chart for the past month. It doesn’t look very promising, if you’re an investor.
For some investors, this drop has been substantial. If you just happened to be the world’s worst investor, you might have bought Stratasys in January of 2014, when it was priced at a stratospheric USD$136.46 per share. If you sold those stocks early today, you would have lost around 88% of your investment.
Of course, most investors would have less, but still notable damage. But we feel that for many of these investors, it perhaps was their own decisions that led them to this state: buying a stock at its peak is probably not the best idea. We and others in the 3D print industry have long been expecting a crash, simply based on the hype cycle concept: any technology has a period of abnormal interest from the public soon after it’s discovered, followed by a crash when people learn the technology is not as amazing as they thought. That’s precisely what we’re seeing here.
The Hype cycle also predicts a gradual rise in interest following the crash as people gradually learn how to apply the technology in profitable ways. That’s a phase we’ve yet to see.
Meanwhile, 3D printing equipment orders may be down, but the technology is still quite useful for many applications – with more innovations constantly arriving. From our perspective, there is reason to expect not only Stratasys’ stock price to rise, but others in the 3D print business to rise as well, in the long term.
The price of Stratasys is low today. Might it be a good time to buy?
Via Google Finance
