WatchSo what happening with the FB IPO, so far it has failed to explode upwards in price as predicted by lots of financial analysts.
Are people finally realizing that its all hype, and generated only to make a profit for the I-Banks/institutions.
I firmly believe that FB has had it finest moment, and it will start to fade from here on out. With the advent of more people accessing socail media on smart phones, FB will not be able to realize any substantial profits derived from small ads not being present.
Any thoughts?
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Laguna Beach, CA
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I just read on LinkedIn that they expect a $104billion evaluation.
I don't think Facebook is even worth 1/10 that, but I'm sure it will get close. There's a lot of people looking to park money in seemingly safe places, and FB is perceived by some as that haven.
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Los Angeles, CA
Well FB can target advertising like nothing else ever. Better than google can with your gmail account because it knows what all your friends like so could suggest gifts for them at xmas time or for thier birthdays, it knows all your friends b-days and where they live and where they went to school.
pretty impressive and people just hand it all over for free. its a goldmine.
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Rockville, MD
PockyClipsNow says
No they can't. It takes serious (and I mean data centers full of thousands of servers running some very special software) technical mojo to do that. Why do you think Google is what it is? Even Microsoft can't replicate it, Facebook has no shot at it.
The stock has limited upside in the near future. It may pop temporarily based on mania, but it has no long term potential.
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In general, I wouldn't invest into a company whose annual revenue is 1% or 2% of its estimated "valuation". That's insane to me.
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bmwman91's website
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So...will 6 months from now be Bay Area House Price Armageddon when all the FB employees cash out?
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It seems like investors are actually smart. After a 10% or so jump earlier today, it's basically leveled back to the originally offered stock price.
I'm going to guess $20 by December 2012. :)
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bmwman91's website
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Could be. Luckily for FB employees, they didn't have to pay anything for the shares! Free money is free money...I could use some of THAT!
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46 male
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bmwman91 says
Well, it's just one more really. There was Cisco, Oracle, Sun, Yahoo, Google, Apple, all based in the Bay Area, and I don't think any one of their IPOs ever had a huge effect on Bay Area house prices by itself.
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Patrick says
BUY NOW OR BE PRICED OUT FOREVER!!!
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it was hysterically overpriced and vested so hard going in there was little upside left for IPO investors.
Mark, principals and friends and family did OK. Everyone else is just the next sucker.
Post-Internet IPOs are a scam. Last one that made sense was Security Dynamics in 1995.
The rest are all based on Netscape fantasy reasoning - meaning none at all.
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bmwman91 says
I know five guys who got a Domino's franchise in Modesto! They and their employees are going to crank housing prices 10x! Buy now or be priced out forever!
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Los Angeles, CA
dominos is a goldmine too
because all the hot startup coders order that pizza constantly while working 20 hour days for years at thier start ups. ANd modesto is a good location because they spend the other 4 hours in the day driving back and forth to there since BA house prices are too expensive.
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Don't worry about the Pop, what it means is that FB did a great job of pricing the stock. I'm sure they didn't expect to get $38 while doing their road show which is why they then decide to issue more stock.
It just means that Facebook kept more money than the underwriters or speculators.
That's actually a good thing for the company....
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Actually, the underwriters bought back tons of stock, judging by the way that the stock repeatedly hit a shoulder at $38. There was some serious intervention today, and it will be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks.
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FB is fucked. Worthless. GM just pulled their ads, the conversion rate was so pathetic. Zuckaturd will be sued for fraud by everyone in the universe.
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46 male
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bmwman91 says
Very interesting. Maybe they're worried about having dumped it on the public for far more than it's really worth.
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I have a company that could make 100 Gazillion. Right now it makes 1.8 Gazillion, but think of the potential!
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Santa Cruz, CA
Facebook is like yahoo email or shutterfly or dropbox, etc.
It's free and the ads don't do a thing.
I have friends spread around. So, facebook helps facilitate my posting a picture of me doing someting to everyone I know, and a bunch of people I will never meet.
How does the girl in Mexico looking at my picture help her to click an ad for Honda? No one in those countries is going to even glance at the ads for expensive items.
The parts of the world that are actually *growing* buy from places like Walmart and they want products from Nestle and Apple.
Do successful companies need to advertise on Facebook? Of course they don't.
I remember well when Bill Gates bought Hotmail because hotmail had so many subscribers. He paid them $400 million for Hotmail.
Come on.
I once predicted that microsoft would have to give away Office, and I see they did. All you need is an acct and get free Skydrive which has a web version of Office.
I'm digressing. I wonder who the suckers were today.
Now AAPL can go back up. Hurry up, I need to brag to my friend the gold bug.
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I still don't believe its "800 million UNIQUE active users" claim.
The whole world only has 2 billion internet users at most.
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Goran_K says
It's the new paradigm, man. Like, turning profits is the OLD paradigm and totally outdated. As long as investors want to fund our innovation, we can keep going forever.
/1999
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Andy S says
Do you intend to short FB? If so, when?
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Patrick says
The underwriters were defending the $38 price with a huge resting bid.
The articles I read made it sound normal, almost expected-- whereas the blogs are calling it manipulation.
Anyone here have any IPO knowledge? What is normal behavior for the underwriters? Anything potentially illegal going on here?
My gut is to agree with the articles, that this is normal for such a large, public IPO. The underwriters felt their accurate price discovery reputation was on the line.
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xenogear3 says
Well, that is probably true. I have a friend who has two dogs, a cat and a horse. Each of them have their own unique Facebook pages. So that is 5 unique Facebook users-just one of them human though ...
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OH GOD OH GOD I'M RUINED!
I bet my entire nest egg on Facebook and it's ALL GONE.
Now instead of sipping drinks drinks while servants fan me on the porch of this beauty:
I'll have to move into one of these:
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I have three - IDs like Phukkbo McZpazz and Plotch Kloppfer and Phace Bighter - connected to all manner of random people of almost no relation. The ads are completely random and of no connection at all to my real life. Since I claim my birthday indicates I am 114 years old, I get occasional ads for adult diapers. It looks like General Motors finally figured out how this kind of user base amounts to a completely useless cohort for its advertising needs. Their marketing people have telling metrics no doubt and after a few years of instrumented data have decided shouting into a random set is less useful in connecting to consumers than conventional alternatives. Only a matter of time before the rest of the marketers figure out what GM has concluded.
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Pleasanton, CA
When I saw that eTrade was offering IPO shares in FB to retail account holders, I knew the price was already at or beyond the upside potential. Otherwise, the underwriters would have only offered shares to their institutional customers and valuable account holders -- as usual. Instead, they had to enlist the support of the public (the dumb money) to sell the supposedly over-subscribed offering.
As they said in Rounders, if you look around the table and can't spot the sucker -- it's you. And any retail customer who thought they were "so lucky" to get IPO shares through their brokerage was also the sucker.
They would NEVER offer IPO shares to the public if they thought there was any upside in the offering. Never... so I knew by last week that this thing was a dud.
That, and the GM announcement which proved what I already knew (being in the industry) that advertising on FB is not effective for advertisers. For the past year or more, marketers have been spending gobs of money on FB ads because they "have to," regardless of cost and performance, because it's the hot thing -- and because they're told to by CMOs who don't want to miss out if there's a "there" there. But they're starting to question the ROI ,and will start pulling back on these budgets as more and more advertisers demonstrate that it's not working, and it's "okay" to stop advertising there.
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rented is very astute.
My goldbug friend asked me the other day why I want some Facebook and I said their business probably sucks. He looked shocked.
The majority of the people I am friends with are guys my age who don't buy anything based on ads, or even look at them, or they are people with no means to buy anything anyway.
I originally got facebook so my neice could keep in touch with me and through facebook, her grandmother my mother.
Others are overseas people so somehow they became the most "friends" I have. The number of friends one has seems inversely proportional to 1. age 2. being male
I.E., younger, hotter females have the most friends. They have the least money usually too.
Where can a company buy ads? Everywhere. So, what is Facebooks competition? Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, google, every website with readable content, so facebook has about as many competitors for its business as facebook has members.
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lostandconfused reminds me. I made a facebook account for a dog too! I wonder how many ads he clicks?
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CBOEtrader says
Yes done a few.. and no, its not normal unless its a big client name.
Certainly the spread between the price and higher opening is banked by the underwriter (morgan stanley). So its an incentive to keep it above syndicate price. IN most cases the Underwriter will serve as investment broker so they want to keep FB as client going forward.
Why did it fall ? ... MS fixed the price at $38 given the demand and then FB after added 25% more shares.. the price wasnt adjusted for the additional shares.. with more shares as supply, prices should have been adjusted downwards... the market reacted.
There was also a system glitch.. which impacted order taking.
No, not illegal.
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I've been on a couple of friends and family lists for IPOs and most everything was ready to be acquired by institutional investors at the IPO. They were boring infrastructure plays with conservative accounting. But they were valued highly by people who understood those industries and were booked out to the old-line investment houses and mutual funds on day one. Facebook has been a hairball of an investment vehicle from its inception. Zuckfuck's real innovation has always been in his ability to find the next round of suckers to believe his latest valuation was rational.
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Las Vegas, NV
Successful IPOs usually pop nicely if priced properly. There have been several IPOs priced to perfection in the last couple of years. This is not good for repeat business. Why buy the IPO and go into broker lockup? If you like it then wait and buy after the IPO at a discount.
There are several things about this IPO that smell. One to watch out for soon is the release of insiders to sell. Usually there is a lockup period of 6 months. Suckybug negotiated a 3 month lockup period for all his employees. This thing may go under $5 in the next couple of years. I wish I could borrow the shares to short it. Only the hedge funds and fat cats will be able to borrow and short this turkey.
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Rockville, MD
As soon as the "puts" go live...guess who'll be buyng them? :)
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chzwiz says
So much for the 1000 new Multi Millionaires the pathic media was crowing about...
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Pleasanton, CA
Sorry, there are already thousands of them. They've been selling on SecondMarket for a while now... and they'll make millions selling even at $20 or $30...
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Will questionable FB IPO, remove from housing market one of reason for low inventory ”Facebook effect”?
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They shorten', they hatin' !!!
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PockyClipsNow says
You smoke the good stuff. What is it, indica sativa?
They dont have a phone, they dont have a phone story, most of the users are using FB app, at the grace of aapl and goog, and they dont have any employees, some 3500, and they dont have any real intellectual property, and they have, get this, they sole thing of value they have, A WEB SITE, like friendster, and myspace, its a website, with 900 million broke gen x and gen y people the world over with no disposable money because rent, food, gas, tuition and housing is brutally overpriced. no dough, but consuming terabytes a second recording who bopped who last night.
Yeah, a real goldmine headed by a hoodie wearing intellectual property thief who knows how to got to the top of the heap where it should be plain to see, the emperor has no clothes.
it should also be noted that adsense was bought by goog, as was youtube and andriod. All the innovation is stolen or bought by the oligarchs. Appl stole from Xerox Parc. MSFT stole from Kildall. IBM and Sun actually invented new things without resorting to petty theft for most of it.
We dont celebrate innovation as a society, it seems, we-all celebrate thieves and robber barons ripping off the world and the future getting to the top so they can have a marble mirror pool a mile long in a 10 million dollar an acre estate while the rest of us eat ramen to put the kids through school.
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Rented through the downturn says
Thats just BS from journalist.. you cant sell anything on the secondary market unless its fully approved by the Board of Directors (Due to Goverence) and must be in compliance with SEC limits of 500 investors. Pre Ipo stock very often is restricted from trading and transfering to other parties. The 1000s is really not feasible...
The majority of the 2ndary trades are from a handful of VCs and Microsoft who already invested 100s millions. These same investors are the ones who piled in mega millions into FB already. Its not some scruffy engineer banking into millions.
One needs more info than what some journalist says.. they oftern dont understand the whole story here.
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Pleasanton, CA
While folks here keep referring to FB's user base as a collection of broke Gen X and Yers, you should know that their largest and fastest growing audience is the highly valuable female, 35-55 segment, which has a lot of money. In fact, it's their younger demographics that are at risk.
That said, again, it's the format and the context of the FB website that makes the ads ineffective. Therefore, FB's big move will be to take their intrusive data-set and sell it off of their site to advertisers who can make money advertising on other publishers' sites.
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Rented through the downturn says
yes, I know. posting pictures of their kids and their adventures. Buying stuff? no. Just trying to stitch the family back together with zuck trying to spy and sell the info. Rather pathetic really. I have never not once even SEEN an ad on FB. And funny, those FB phone apps are ad-less , sadly, developed by a third party, lol, some 100bn company. What a POS.