Facebook IPO Stumbles Out of the Gate 423
Facebook's much-hyped IPO kicked off today, but an anonymous reader points out that things didn't go quite as smoothly as investors hoped. "Public trading didn't get underway until about 11:30 a.m. ET, half an hour after it was supposed to. The delay was likely caused by the huge amount of interest in the stock – especially by retail investors. In the first few minutes of trading, Facebook shares were only up between 5 and 10 per cent and by noon were essentially back down to the IPO price of $38. Many observers had expected the stock to double in price by the end of the day, if not sooner." The NY Times has a data visualization showing how Facebook's IPO compares to other tech IPOs throughout the years, and how the first day of trading treated all of those companies. Meanwhile, the debate is lively over whether the social networking giant will be a good investment. "The banks helping take Facebook public want us to value this 8-year-old upstart at as much as $104 billion, more than Disney or Kraft Foods, though those companies earn three and four times more. That top valuation is also more than 100 times Facebook's earnings last year, versus 13 times for the average company. At such a high price, it will take years for this so-called earnings multiple to fall to a more reasonable level, and that's assuming the company can maintain its torrid earnings growth."
ObNelson (Score:5, Funny)
(points) Ha ha!
They remember the Dot-Com Bubble (Score:5, Funny)
A bunch of investors throwing tons of money after dot-com companies on the belief that these companies, despite having no earnings, would somehow grow big. Then in 1999-2000 the bubble burst.
Today's investors are not going to make the same mistake of going after another dot-com company that has almost no earnings. The memory of 13 years ago is still too fresh. (Plus many of them are probably short on cash due to the ongoing recession.)
Re:GOOG is undervalued (Score:5, Funny)
Eventually GOOG will move into their endgame, where you pay $20 per month for the service of them not sending your "private browsing" search history to every one of your Gmail and Android contacts list entries.
Re:It's stupid to compare to Facebook's profit (Score:5, Funny)
MEME TIME
Remember M$ and "Monkey Boy"?
Remember MAFIAA ?
Here's our NEW MEME. Carry this in every Facbook CEO Namecheck:
"Suckerborg".
Thank you. That is All.
Re:And Facebook will NEVER monetize through ads (Score:5, Funny)
People still print ads? On paper?
It's that stuff you see outside, under the daystar.
Re:GOOG is undervalued (Score:5, Funny)
FB knows your stated desires. GOOG knows you're hidden desires.
Between the two of them, they could create one heck of a phone sex operation.
Re:It's stupid to compare to Facebook's profit (Score:5, Funny)
Congratulations on missing the point.
Re:It's stupid to compare to Facebook's profit (Score:5, Funny)
for the 5000th fucking time NO they don't want to play Farmville or meet singletons in their area now.
Tell me about it. I tried to meet singletons in my area, but they kept giving me the same one over and over again no matter how many times I asked for a new one.
Re:It's stupid to compare to Facebook's profit (Score:2, Funny)
I'd love to see them try and quantify Kate Moss.
We all know she's thin, but I'm pretty sure a set of bathroom scales would still work.