Massive LinkedIn IPO Raises Dotcom Bubble Concerns 169
The Installer writes with news of yesterday's stock offering from LinkedIn, which shocked investors by closing at more than double the initial price. "Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper. The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares." That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue, leading to speculation that this is either evidence of the second dotcom bubble (a possibility we discussed in February) or a "watershed moment for social media." Many experts are questioning the value of LinkedIn, while others are claiming intentional market manipulation.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe 5 years ago, but since then it's become a useless collection of unemployed strangers giving referrals to other unemployed strangers, and a collection of spam posters.
Almost nobody keeps their profile up to date, because the vast majority of its "users" don't even bother to use it any more.
Bubble bubble upon the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
The amazing thing about these economic bubbles is that they continue to inflate even though virtually all participants know they're engaging in a bubble. This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it
Re:Bubble bubble upon the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it.
The thing is, as bad as bubbles are for the system, for each individual caught up in them in modern times they are very much a winning proposition, for a bunch of reasons:
1. For almost all of them, there is a greater fool out there. For instance, on the bad subprime mortgage market, Goldman Sachs made darn sure that when it hit the fan that all of it was propelled in the direction of AIG.
2. If a bubble breaks, you're likely to get bailed out by Uncle Sam if you're big enough and stupid enough, so you really have nothing to worry about.
3. Even if your company has gone under, thanks to limited liability the person making the decision to buy bubble assets knows they won't be penalized too much by the loss.
4. Thanks to most corporate cultures in big Wall St firms, if you ever play it on the safe side and react to a bubble by staying out of it, you'll be penalized a great deal for performing below the market during the bubble.
So game theory gives our fund manager 2 options with some theoretical payoffs:
1. Play it safe: +10, or
2. Buy into the bubble: 90% chance of +100 / 10% chance of +0.
Any rational fund manager picks option 2.
Everyone is missing the real point (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be obvious that the "public" stock markets are a crooked casino run by the investment banks. They own the cops; all the alphabet agencies that claim to "regulate" trading activity. They own all the politicians, who make the laws that determine whether illicit activity is permitted. They even own the Supreme Court, who says a batch of numbers controlled by an oligarchy is a human being in the eyes of the law and the courts. If you're a single person who raises a flag, the SEC will freeze your assets and try to haul you into court. If you're big enough to be a Madoff, then you get to run your scam until you piss off the wrong people. If you're Goldman Sachs, you're untouchable.
The "public" stock market is meaningless. Its not even where all the "big" action is happening. All the real money making is in the derivatives floor. And most of that are private transactions between banks. That doesn't even include the shadow stock market located outside of NY. That's the place where thousands of transactions are being made at hundredths of a second. What is the economic utility in making trading decisions faster than 1 second, before a human being can even initiate a buy/sell decision? And finally, the real money is made on the commodities floor, where collusion between the oil companies, investment banks, and high end speculators can drive up the price of consumer oil by $1/gal. in the middle of an oil GLUT.
Who gives a damn about Linkedin getting an overvalued IPO? The "public" stock market is meaningless compared the trading activity happening outside of the exchanges. The Facebook IPO didn't even happen on the trading floor! It was a "private" sale to avoid gov't regulators. The NYSE significance is trivial to the global economy. That's why the US gov't is going to allow it to be bought by foreign owners. You can pore through company statements, do your due diligence, read the Wall Street Journal, it doesn't matter. What you and the peons think a company's valuation and quality of its leadership is irrelevant. It'll get wiped down to peanuts by the single flick of an unreported derivatives trade.
Re:I dont get it (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not investment. It's speculation.
The only investors are ignorant of the lack of genuine value of LinkedIn. (Which is much less than their original price.)
The majority of the people are looking to get rich off of the hype and dump the stock ASAP.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:3, Insightful)
So ... you'll be exactly like me, except I didn't need to get spammed by cold calling recruiters to do so.
Do you think for some reason there will be no recruiters available to you if you AREN'T on LinkedIn?
I'm guessing you think recruiters are some form of special person that finds 'talent' ... the reality of it is, recruiters are nothing more than head hunters, your relationship with them is irrelevant, you're nothing more than a resume. Any friendliness they show to you is simply to ensure they make the most possible amount off you when they whore your resume out.
When the time comes, you can accomplish the same thing yourself with a couple phone calls.
And you ad a connection to these people? Seriously? THAT IS WHY LINKEDIN IS POINTLESS. Your connections mean nothing, you add them just like people add Facebook friends, your connections are meaningless, again, underscoring how worthless LinkedIn actually is as you've proven yourself how meaningless the networking aspect of LinkedIn is since it too has turned into a popularity contest.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)
I never bothered to join linkedin, but I know a few people who have recently quit because they kept getting spam from recruiters as a result of their linkedin profile. Lots of recruiters seem to be doing very rough matches based on published skills and sending them messages about jobs that they're neither interested in nor qualified for.
That's stupid, quitting linkedin over unsolicited recruiters e-mails (not to mention probably false - about knowing people that have quit over the spam.) It's like I know this guy who went to Iraq and he knows of a ex-marine that has a tracking chip implanted on his ass. Same. Lame. As for quitting Linkedin for receiving unsolicited recruiter emails, that's like quitting going to a nudie bar because you are getting too many erections. I mean, the whole point of being in linkedin is to increase one's exposure to recruiters and potential job-related connections. What were these people thinking they were going to get when they joined in? How do you spell "duh!"?
Personally, I don't get that many, maybe 12 a week. I mostly ignore them, but once in a while I do read and *gasp* "connect" to one of them.
It is an excellent tool for what it is intended to. And though some of the technical discussion forums are moronic, there are quite a few that have been quite valuable. I've been able to keep track of past colleagues (some of them that I have not seen in over a decade) as they move from company to company. When I was unemployed about two years ago, it was through LinkedIn that I re-connected a long-lost contact who pointed me up to a couple of job opportunities. I personally got contacted by a long-lost contact from grad school that I pointed out to an ex-employer that had a job opening. Those are just two real-life examples.
Just one more arsenal for keeping one's professional network, stuff that only the stupid/overconfident can ignore. These tools, like anything else in the so-called "new media" (I hate that term), they are what you make of them. And what you make of them is more a function of who you are than anything else.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:2, Insightful)
Value for whom, though? How does LinkdIn directly benefit from you having a professional network?
Apparently it allows them to sell a lot of stock.