As investors we often fall in love with stocks or industries, but do we ever think about investing in love? Valentine’s day only comes around once a year and is a day where we can show our significant others how much we appreciate them by taking them out for a nice dinner or perhaps showering them with gifts. But how can we put an investing spin on this day of romance? Think about this, love is probably one industry that will never go out of style and will always be a part of the human experience. So even as technology advances, we can always expect love and human connections to exist in some form or another. Let’s take a look at a couple of companies that deal directly in the business of love.
Match Group Inc (NASDAQ:MTCH): The undisputed king of dating apps (so far),Match Group has seen its stock surge by over 120% during the past year. The Dallas, Texas based company owns a lot of the big names in the dating space including Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Hinge, OkCupid, and of course, Match.com. Match Group has reported a huge spike in usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, as people seek out any form of human contact. Way back in March of 2020, at the first real surge of the pandemic, Tinder reported a record 3 billion swipes in one day. Several apps, including Tinder, have added the new normal way of communication: video chat, which has seen the platform’s popularity continue to rise. Match Group also recently made a huge purchase in the Asian market as it acquired South Korean social networking platform Hyperconnect for $1.7 billion. Hyperconnect specializes in connecting people around the world through video platforms, so it is easy to see why Match Group would want to embed this brand into their current ecosystem. It also gives them access to a rapidly growing market in South Korea which only acts to expand Match Group’s global presence. For now, Match Group is the industry leader, but recently another company made its public debut…
Bumble Inc (NASDAQ:BMBL): Last week Bumble made its public debut on Wall Street to a resounding success as the stock skyrocketed by over 60% on its first trading day. The female-friendly dating app has also experienced the COVID-19 surge, and was one of the first to implement video chat capabilities. The idea behind Bumble is that females can contact men based on a swipe match, but men cannot. While Bumble has trailed Tinder in terms of active users and downloads, it has quickly gained in popularity, especially with females. The creator and CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd was also a co-creator of Tinder before leaving Match Group for some well-documented and negative reasons. Herd seems to have realized that wherever the females go, the men will follow. As for the stock, it is difficult to determine if this was just a surge in a very frothy market that has shown lots of love for IPOs, or if Bumble can carve out a space as a legitimate threat to Match Group in the long run.
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