Well, the 10 year story as a public company seems to be over now.

Glad I followed some sensible investing rules and averaged down on a stock I was personally quite confident in being a longer term winner. At takeover price I will only be down about 6% from my average buy-in price so can't make much of a complaint. Unfortunate that the takeover valuation was so low (Morningstar - as much as it's advice can be trusted - has it around $1.62)

A lot of people buying in at the $2.00 IPO would be upset, but a bunch getting in 3 months later at $0.70 would be stoked to have a 35% gain in such a short period of time!

So last December Cashrewards was brought to the market at a listing price of $1.73.

In the Prospectus the Chairman and Founder jointly penned a letter where they outlined the investment case and the bouyant prospects for the business. Just 10 months later a subcommittee of the Board led by the Chairman is recommending shareholders accept a takeover offer from ANZ at $1.135. And the Founder (not on the subcommittee for obvious reasons) is expressing his support for this.

[Not held]

Interested by the comments listed on here already.

Here's how I see it;

CRW vs ShopBack. Australian startup that donates 1% of profits to the Starlight foundation (I believe they were first listed on ASX to do so, but please correct me if not) vs A company from Singapore that has probably spent more money on marketing and paying out fraudulant transactions than developing insights into customer behaviour.

To further that comparison, trustpilot reviews have CRW at 89% Excellent vs 69% Excellent for an overall rating of 4.9/5 over 4.4/5. It is also worth noting the details provided on Trustpilot's CRW reviews vs the one line Shopback reviews.

In terms of the reports that there is a bit of a wait to access funds, as it stands there is a $10.01 AUD minimum withdrawal amount and most sign up bonuses and fast-tracked transactions are ready to be claimed within 7 days. Of course I agree theyn should be looking into ways of speeding up that process with the vendors HOWEVER I would actually see it fit that a company I own shares in is waiting until they themselves get paid out for the sale before it gets paid to the customer. Then me being a customer, it's not unreasonable to expect that those funds have to clear before I get my "free money".

The thing that I like about the business model is that they really aren't asking for any 'more' money from the stores or the customer. It's money that was already allocated by the store to be spend on online marketing, clicks on google, email letter drops. 

The company is still "small" but has been expanding well under the radar for nearly 10 years now. Founder CEO up until recently where growth must be predicted to surge futher. They had already delivered $100,000,000 AUD in cashback to customers within the first 5 years. Not sure exactly where the figures are now but I recall seeing another milestone recently.
If AUS has a $30B internet sales market and a company can squeeze 1% off the top of that it's still a $300M annual turnover... Looks like they do better than that anyway. Plus an average of 15% growth in online sales annually for the last few years?

I bought a bunch on the IPO day around $2 and now that it's sitting at $1.00 I've been slowly buying back to even out current losses because from my simpleton's point of view - the company isnt going anywhere but up (long term).

This is a train I want to be on.