Topic: How To Invest

Q: Pat, can I get your recommendation on Duolingo, trading on Nasdaq. Thank you.

Article Excerpt

A: Duolingo Inc., $211.40, symbol DUOL on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 35.8 million; Market cap: $8.9 billion; www.duolingo.com), is the top-grossing education app on Google Play and the Apple App Store. It has more than 800 million downloads. Founded in 2011, the company offers courses on over 40 distinct languages—from the world’s most spoken, such as Spanish and French, to endangered languages like Hawaiian, Navajo and Scottish Gaelic. It also offers fictional languages from TV shows like Star Trek and Game of Thrones. The company has a “freemium” business model: the app and the website are accessible free of charge, although Duolingo also offers a premium service, Super Duolingo (formerly called Duolingo Plus), for a subscription fee. Duolingo has locations in the U.S., China and Germany. Notably, the company believes that there are more people in the U.S. learning languages on Duolingo than there are foreign language learners in all U.S. high schools combined. In addition, there are more people learning certain languages on…