patrick.net

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.

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.

PockyClipsNow says

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.

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.

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.

So...will 6 months from now be Bay Area House Price Armageddon when all the FB employees cash out?

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. :)

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!

bmwman91 says

So...will 6 months from now be Bay Area House Price Armageddon when all the FB employees cash out?

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.

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.

BUY NOW OR BE PRICED OUT FOREVER!!!

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.

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....

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.

bmwman91 says

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.

Very interesting. Maybe they're worried about having dumped it on the public for far more than it's really worth.

I have a company that could make 100 Gazillion. Right now it makes 1.8 Gazillion, but think of the potential!

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.

I still don't believe its "800 million UNIQUE active users" claim.

The whole world only has 2 billion internet users at most.

Goran_K says

I have a company that could make 100 Gazillion. Right now it makes 1.8 Gazillion, but think of the potential!

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

bmwman91 says

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.

Very interesting. Maybe they're worried about having dumped it on the public for far more than it's really worth.

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.

xenogear3 says

I still don't believe its "800 million UNIQUE active users" claim.

The whole world only has 2 billion internet users at most.

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 ...

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:

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.

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.

lostandconfused reminds me. I made a facebook account for a dog too! I wonder how many ads he clicks?