Facebook To Go Public On Friday, May 18

redletterdave writes "The IPO on everyone's minds for the past few years — and possibly the biggest one in history — is upon us: Facebook will finally make its Wall Street debut on Friday, May 18, 2012. Sources also say Facebook will begin its IPO roadshow on Monday, May 7, and will eventually list its shares on the Nasdaq (not NYSE) with the ticker symbol 'FB.' Facebook looks to raise anywhere from $5 billion to $10 billion during its roadshow to achieve a $100 billion valuation, which would make it one of the biggest IPOs of all-time."

Re:Best avoided

[icebike]

I'm on a lot of such lists, and you will never read anything of interest there.

Re:Organ donations ...

[Sez Zero]

What is Facebook's actual revenues? Something like $200M quarterly?

LA Times is reporting [latimes.com] $3.7B annual revenue, so an average $925M quarterly.

Re:Best avoided

[alexander_686]

Why borther with buying a share? Anything they send out to shareholders they also have to publish on SEC's Edger. It is a great little resource.

http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html [sec.gov]

Now, buy a share of Berkshire Hathaway. You can get the information off the SEC, but Buffett really knows how to put on a show.

Re:Best avoided

[vlm]

You have it wrong. They have to document a semi-detailed, lets say, one page income statement listing classes of income, and it gets stamped with the approval of a corrupt auditing agency (recall recent scandals where it was all faked).

Trust me, Wisconsin Energy does not give me a copy of individual bills in each quarterly statement. You get lines like "$1B revenue from electric"

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

My bet is that, just like in most IPOs, the only people to make money from it will be the institutional investors that get in as preferred (early access before normal trading). They'll then cash out as early trading and the "day trader" mentality causes the price to go spiking up. The folks that buy during that spike will be left holding the (empty) bag. Again, as usual. This seems to always happen on these "big" IPO offers. Google's was the same way. Now - if you buy during the spike, you might still make money if you can steel yourself to hold onto it for awhile. Maybe. If you are lucky. Otherwise, for folks like the average slashdot reader, it is a "don't buy".

Yep...

[koan]

Bubble goes pop.

Facebook's ad business isn't very (or so some claim) because of the way they target ads (like TV ads) so expect a lot fo change (again) in Facebook's policies.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/05/02/businessinsiderfacebooks-lousy-ad-b.DTL [sfgate.com]

Your Facebook ID becomes the way you pay for everything online and offline. Long-term, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's goals seems to be for your Facebook ID to be your ID everywhere. Given smartphone adoption, you can imagine this happening online and off. If that were to happen, the easiest way for Facebook to make money would be to facilitate offline and online transactions. Potential: PayPal, part of eBay, has an enterprise value close to $20 billion or so. Visa has a market cap of $100 billion.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-lousy-ad-business-is-making-its-ipo-is-looking-hairier-by-the-minute--heres-why-it-doesnt-matter-2012-5#ixzz1tkK42pqr [businessinsider.com]

Re:Elephant in the room

[DerekLyons]

Google's was the same way.

No, it wasn't. On opening day it closed at 100.35, and except for two days two weeks after their IPO... it's never been below that.