GoPro Is Tanking After This Weekend's Barron's Article

REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Over the weekend, Barron's Alexander Eule published a cautious article on GoPro, and this morning the stock is down more than 4%. Earlier, shares of GoPro were down as much as 6.5%.

In Barron's, Eule's piece, titled "GoPro's Thrill-Filled IPO Adventure May End Badly," said that GoPro faces the risk, like so many tech gadgets, of being "subsumed by our phones."

Eule:

"IN SOME WAYS, THE EXCITEMENT over GoPro is a quaint return to pre-smartphone days. It's hard to find stand-alone gadgets that haven't been subsumed by our phones. GoPro, though, still risks suffering a similar fate. The cautionary tale is Flip, the groundbreaking camera that Cisco Systems bought for $590 million in 2009. The Flip was a miniature marvel, bringing the world high-definition home videos from a device that easily fit in a back pocket. Nifty idea, but it was a feature, not a product, as Apple's iPhone soon made clear. Cisco shuttered the Flip business just two years after its purchase."

GoPro shares went bonkers after its IPO, but eventually pared some of those gains. But even so, at current prices, the company has a market cap of about $4.7 billion.

We noted that after the stock's steep run up, short sellers began circling GoPro, seeing an opportunity after a massive run up.

After a less-than-stellar bit of press over the weekend, GoPro bears are taking control during a session that is seeing the Nasdaq rally.