Facebook To Go Public On Friday, May 18 182
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."
Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone have to say it: Bubble
There.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Interesting)
My bet is that the IPO will be a success, just not an hysteric one.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook is indeed profitable.
But merely a fad. Just as much as AOL chat rooms, Friendster and MySpace, and possibly even YouTube and Twitter.
There's nothing demanding that users continue to user Facebook, nothing binds their behavior, and worst of all, user interest can easily evaporate overnight.
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I still wonder how it is that they are profitable.
Nobody pays anything for the service, other than with their privacy.
It only started turning a profit in late 2009.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the normal Facebook user doesn't pay anything. They are the product not the customer. Facebook's customers are all the companies that advertise on it, or buy people's private data.
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I still wonder how it is that they are profitable. Nobody pays anything for the service, other than with their privacy.
Same way television was profitable for many years for the likes of CBS, NBC & ABC. Nobody paid anything to watch TV either and the broadcasters had tremendous infrastructure expenses.
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The same way Google makes a profit: spying on you.
You can hardly call it spying when the sheep willingly post the details of their daily life voluntarily.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:4, Interesting)
> They spy on you whether you have an account or not. Unless you actively make
> the effort to block their servers from loading widgets on every other page you visit.
That's what I do. Here are their IP addresses in CIDR format and as address ranges. This includes blocking their "Like" buttons.
66.220.144.0/20 66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
69.63.176.0/20 69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
69.171.224.0/19 69.171.224.0 - 69.171.255.255
74.119.76.0/22 74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
173.252.64.0/18 173.252.64.0 - 173.252.127.255
204.15.20.0/22 204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
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Ghostery [ghostery.com] to the rescue. Don't be the product.
Also known as:"actively make the effort" :P
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Don't forget the sheep posting the details of eachother's lives. You might keep my posts professional enough for my boss and grandma while not disclosing but you just need that one asshole frienemy to tag you taking jello shots off a stripper for that strategy to fail. You can decide not to have an account and be blissfully ignorant of all the posts you're included in but, they are still there.
Most of the pages you visit will have Facebook widgets to carefully track your browsing usage for whatever analyti
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook is indeed profitable.
But merely a fad. Just as much as AOL chat rooms, Friendster and MySpace, and possibly even YouTube and Twitter.
There's nothing demanding that users continue to user Facebook, nothing binds their behavior, and worst of all, user interest can easily evaporate overnight.
Oh but there is something demanding that users continue to use Facebook: The Network Effect [wikipedia.org].
And within Facebook's network effect, Critical mass has long since been surpassed and Metcalfe's Law [wikipedia.org] has grown to such a large proportion that, for current users of Facebook, leaving Facebook is akin to simply switching off the internet altogether.
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And yet half the people i know say they haven't checked their facebook page in months...
Its there...they can't leave... but its pretty much abandoned...
I'm curious what percentage of people have an account due to the network effect of needing one to see something or other from time to time, and beyond that never using the site.
Do they make up 10% of facebook? 50%? 80%?
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This gets to be a bit of a grey area tho. Alot of these guys have mobile phones with facebook apps, so even if there is no activity, and no active checking of facebook... the apps still login and check for updates...
I expect that counts as "active", even if no new content is ever actually consumed or created.
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Is that 13.14% completely dormant?
Also, I'm curious what percentage don't create any new content regularly (ie dont post) I suspect a large number of people just have their cell phone facebook app passively consume content... and if a circle of friends posts die off, their mobile apps all keep pinging the site for non-existent updates... the entire circle has moved on... but they still all "check in" every 5 minutes according to facebook...
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you wouldn't want to end up like one of those fools that bought Google stock from August 2004 - Dec 2005 and sold it at literally any time that wasn't Oct 2008 - May 2009. Or even worse, one of those morons that bought it in the first month when it was under $150 a share! I bet they feel dumb now for buying stock in a company that's already successful.
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The problem is... There's been no dividends. You have to sell the shares to get value out of the stock. It's only worth the paper the certs are printed on while you're holding onto it until you find a bagholder that's willing to pay the price you're selling it for.
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Yeah, I can see how only being able to quadruple your money once would be an issue.
Re:Elephant in the room (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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The only real way to make money on the IPO would be at the start of the spike and attempt to ride the shareseller price up to almost the peak and sell at that theshold- you don't want to become a bagholder on the thing.
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It's not just mentality, it's how the market rules are laid out. The possibility of short selling keeps prices from spiking up regularly (effectively, the short sellers punish overeager buyers). Short-selling a stock is very difficult within its first 30 days, meaning that most otherwise-market-neutral traders end up with a long bias on this stock. Of course the stock jumps up as a result. Now, the "IPO mentality" exacerbates this phenome
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I know economics isn't a zero-sum game, but facebook isn't generating wealth here. Where did it come from?
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Profitable?
Does it produce anything of merit or value past being somethig akin to TV 2.0 for the masses that have Internet?
No?
About like most of the other "social" networking things- I keep wondering how they are making money...because it's not paid for by regular advertising and it's not paid for by Web 1.0 style advertising- and it sure as hell isn't paid for by it's users. "Dot-Bomb 2.0" is what I've been thinking about this.
NO. Not a bubble (Score:2, Insightful)
Facebook is God's gift to marketing data. People willingly give their personal data to have their little ego sites.
Here's the kink: Most of that data is bullshit. And frankly, I love it. Here's an example:
This little old lady I know was told by her kids and friends (myself NOT included - I told her to NOT have a FB account!) to give bullshit data. She really wanted an account, so we insisted that she give enough for those assholes at FB to allow her to open an account. She had to give a cell number - it fr
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if you're a marketer and you're using FB for data mining pupsoses
Marketing people are used to that. You think the girl who fills in the surveys at the supermarket has never "cheated" or decided that it would be easier just to put garbage in the forms herself and go home early? You think market research companies - yes even the big ones - never fudge their reports? Yet despite all that, businesses manage to hold on to marketing departments. So either marketing departments are really good at marketing the need for a marketing department, or maybe there are a few tools avai
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So either marketing departments are really good at marketing the need for a marketing department, or maybe there are a few tools available to cut through the crap and figure out which data out of the mountain of data is actually important and relevant, and which isn't.
And the answer is: marketing departments are really good at marketing the need for a marketing department
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Moral of the story, if you're a marketer and you're using FB for data mining pupsoses - AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
I think the more valuable data they get is:
1) Who you're "friends" are (both real people and show/band/product pages).
2) What links you click on.
3) What links your friends click on.
4) The overlap of 2 and 3.
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I thought "Dot-Bomb 2.0"...yeah, bubble.
Best avoided (Score:5, Insightful)
This will open low, shoot high, then nosedive and stay low for a long time.
You can play in this sandbox, as long as you understand that all the sand belongs to someone else, and at bets you can get in, fill your bucket, dump it, and get back out before any one notices you are there.
Everybody recognizes this for what it is, a cashout for the major FB players.
Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on a lot of such lists, and you will never read anything of interest there.
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Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Insightful)
There are very few companies like Facebook whom have no documented source of their income. They are under legal obligation to provide investors with mission & earning statements.
I've read a lot of them.
You will find precious little detail in the revenue side of a 10K. You get exactly what they want you to get, while sales data is masked and obfuscated and aggregated to the point that you can't tell anything from the Balance sheet. Entire massive R&D projects can be hidden on the costs side of the ledger, such that companies like Apple can spring an entire new concept in in smart phones after three years of development with no one having any clear idea of the cost involved, or even that the project was underway from reading financial statements and annual reports.
Seriously, if you think Sarbanes–Oxley or GAAP rules or SEC regulations provide any clarity or a level playing field you are delusional.
Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the footnotes. That's where you'll find the really juicy stuff. Not everything is disclosed, certainly; but the footnotes are where the traders spend the vast majority of their time.
Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Informative)
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"
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You buy the stock, you get the reports.
I'm casually interested in seeing what they think I need to know. But I certainly don't expect to find anything in there that will give me a great deal of new insight. With some foreign stock holdings, its about the only information you can really find.
Re:Best avoided (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Easier for it to just show up in the mail. I'm very, very, lazy.
Then you're going to be pissed off that several of my reports are now email delivered. No snail mail, or less, anyway.
Examples:
Wisconsin energy is a paper only company. I believe email delivery is optional for quarterlies, but they like to snail mail a big ole paperback book once a year for annual.
I believe PRPFX (a mutual fund) is a email only company. I might have gotten an annual in the snail mail, but I haven't seen a quarterly from those guys in .. forever I guess.
Definitely SLV and GLD (ETFs) are e
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Here are the rules:
Publish = File and send - either a paper or email copy - shareholder's perfance.
File = Put a copy up on the company's web site and SEC's Edger. Mailings only happen if a person requests it.
Public Companines must publish once a year, and file the other 3 times.
Funds must publish twice a year (Annual and Biannual) and file twice a year.
Annual reports tend to be audited by a independent 3rd party, everything else is held to a lower standard.
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You don't have to be a shareholder. You can get their financials [sec.gov] at the SEC's website.
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I wouldn't buy Facebook.
They support CISPA.
LINK - http://slashdot.org/submission/2049919/mozilla-warns-cispa-is-alarming-threat-to-privacy [slashdot.org]
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Is there a betting pool on how long Zuck stays in charge of FB post-IPO?
I'll start, at, oh, 3.5 years.
-- 77IM
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I'm thinking 2 tops, sooner if tries to make another billion dollar deal on a six figure company.
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Why 3.5 years?
MZ holds over 30% of the company so he is going to have a lot of power. And the IPO is for a thin slice (IIRC 5%) so there not going to be a big shift in who is sitting on the board. And there is no debt - which would be another avenue which could force change.
This is very different then Steve Jobs and Apple or Jerry Yang of Yahoo - who held far less. Even if FB blows up he should be able to hold out for a long time.
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Even post IPO, he would control more than 50% of the voting rights. I would expect him to be the CEO, practically for ever (even if he runs Facebook to ground).
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Organ donations ... (Score:2)
So how much does the whole organ donations thing add to Facebook's value? Must be another couple of billion easily.
They seem a little overvalued to me. It sounds like when Red Hat went IPO in the late 90's. What is Facebook's actual revenues? Something like $200M quarterly?
Re:Organ donations ... (Score:4, Informative)
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:Organ donations ... (Score:4, Insightful)
a $100 billion company should be making a truckload more than that.
google (current market cap $200billion) pulls in about $10billion in quarterly revenue...
judging by that facebook is at best a $20 billion company. about 1/10th the size of google.
yeah, it is a bit more complicated than that, but still facebook is worth nowhere near $100 billion. and really they don't have a whole lot of growth left, they have saturated their market pretty well.
Re:Organ donations ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd disagree about their growth potential. Certainly their user growth will slow down, but there are plenty of untapped revenue streams - for example mobile ads.
But as for the rest I think you're pretty spot on. I took a quick scan of GOOGs 2011 numbers and they have about the same profit margin and a better debt ratio than Facebook, so it's hard for me to see the justification for having 1/2 the market cap of GOOG with ~1/10th the revenue and 1/10th the net income.
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sure they can expand into new markets, but then why haven't they done so already? they have the cash, they aren't doing this IPO to get cash to grow.
so then tell me how they are worth anywhere near $100 billion? maybe in a few years, but wallstreet only cares about the next quarter, not a few years from now.
Eh?? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, they're taking their STOCK public. *Nevermind*...
Imma let you finish (Score:5, Funny)
Look Google I'm really happy for you and Imma let you finish. But Facebook is the BIGGEST IPO OF ALL TIME!
P/E = 105??? (Score:2)
You can read the read hearing and get a lot of the info (check for links upstream).
P/E implies we know the Price and Earnings.
We don’t know the price (because it has not been priced), but the private stock has been trading at $45.
Earnings were a even billion in 2011. The red hearings says about .43c per share after the sale.
So I would guess P/E = 105 with a wide range of error.
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$1B of net income on $3.7B of revenue in 2011. About the same ratio as Google (but at 1/10th the scale).
Epic Win and Epic Fail.. (Score:2)
It isn't Facebook that's being valued... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Do you really think facebook has the personal information of better than ten percent of the population of the planet? I have my doubts.
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No need. (Score:2)
Zuckerburg already allowed my app on his page, so I've already got all the info of him and his friends.
FB? really? (Score:5, Interesting)
In the real estate biz FB means "f*cked buyer" like a guy who bought at a multigenerational top of a housing bubble, or a guy trying to do landlording from another coast, or a guy stuck paying two mortgages because the old house won't sell, guy who bought without contingencies/no inspection and got screwed, guy who believed the lying commissioned real estate agent when she said there were multiple offers so he should raise his bid but there were no offers (she tried that on me and my wife, I laughed at her) etc. Basically a loanowner who didn't get the house he was expecting. Makes all the comments "FB this" and "FB that" sound much funnier.
Re:FB? really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I had that experience, where a house was listed at X, but was told that really it was X+delta close to X itself, because there was bidding war in progress. We walked away right then, and the realtor trying it on us then tried to backpedal, whereupon I told her "You're playing games with us, and because of that, I won't buy this house at ANY price, because I will assume any offer I make that you or your client find acceptable will screw me." It's a form of bait-and-switch and I won't play that game... but a lot of people "fall in love" with a house and have to have it. I guess I've had too many houses in my life to really get that attached to them.
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I had that experience too. As a seller. Except we had multiple offers, and sold some 15k above asking, 35k above the first offer that came in.
We had a potential buyer walk away as well when they were told a bidding war was in progress...
The last car I bought also took nearly a month to close a deal as I and the owner offered and countered via his salesman at a consignment dealership. During that time, the car sat on the lot, and anyone who came to see it was told that although the car wasn't sold there was
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Heh... Nice term. Meshes in nicely with the "shareseller" value term I came up with.
With securities in this day and age, you're looking to sell to the bigger fool than you- trying to ultimately find the bagholder for your stuff so you can cash out while the getting's good.
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Ah thats boring. /.er you're pretty respectable, but some renters... are not. you can really work a guy across the country...
Wait until it gets exciting, like plumbing leaks, or roof needs replacement.
For extra fun, imagine court case involving the rental property. Or insurance claim (storm damage, etc).
Another good entertainment is local code enforcement.
Finally I'll assume that as a
Now there are property management companies that will take care of these kind of problems... for a fee, often rather high.
Yep... (Score:3, Informative)
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:Yep... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh and this...
Venture capitalists fund startups that leverage Facebook data to disrupt their incumbents. Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya left the company to start a venture capital firm with a single mission: fund companies that will use Facebook's open APIs to take over large, calcified industries like banking, education, and healthcare. Palihapitiya is funding a banking startup, for example, that will give potential customers a credit score based on their Facebook activity. Potential: Unknown. The idea is that Facebook will profit from companies using its data to disrupt incumbants the way it figured out how to profit from Facebook gamesmaker Zynga's disruption of the videogame industry.
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#ixzz1tkNTU9mH [businessinsider.com]
Scary.
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Your Facebook ID becomes the way you pay for everything online and offline
Of course. Taxation is one of the best and oldest business models EVER. Just one problem. I didn't vote for FaceBook and various mobile providers to tax me. Not only do I see no benefit in requiring people to have privacy-stealing mobile plans to pay for things, I see it for what it is: taxation without representation.
What are you blathering about? Did you vote for Visa to tax you at ~3%? No, but you likely use them.
If Facebook (or PayPal) offer a competitive service (i.e. facilitating financial transactions in a secure manner) there will be plenty of people willing to pay for it. I could easily see them creating a plug-in that would allow an e-commerce site to let you log in with your FB ID and purchase using your FB credits (or billing it through to a CC you set up on your FB account). I'm not saying I would use it
Question (Score:2)
I have a wager running with a friend. The wager is about how many initial shareholders will buy the shares.
Can anyone tell me how i could find out, how many shares were handed out per buyer (on average) during the IPO?
My wager is that less than a million buyers will receive shares during the IPO.
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That information is heavily restricted, and there is no good source. However, from personal experience, there is going to be a huger dispersion in numbers so averages are going to do you any good.
You can go to the red hearing now, put it won’t tell you how many shares they are planning on selling or at what price. We will know that on the day of the sale.
Most of the shares will be sold to institutions. If they are public they report their holdings once a quarter. It won’t tell you if they bought
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Thank you for the answer....
Since the absolute number of shares sold is public, with the average i could deduce the number of buyers. My bet was, that most stocks will go to institutional buyers and therefor there won't be too many (my bet: 1 million shareholders).
My opponent in the wager postulates, that FB will distribite the shares as far as possible to make their users shareholders as well. He betted on more than 10 million shareholders.
Between 1 and 10 million we consider a draw ;-).
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OK, 2nd post to the same question, but I have been thinking about it.
Let's say...
FB wants to rasis 5B (which is at the low end of guesses)
They price at $50 a share.
That's 100m shares.
Shares are normally sold in lots of 100 - we will call that 1 unit.
So, 1m units will be sold
And since large insti
that's a lot of money (Score:2)
god I hope this shit tanks, suck my balls Mark Fuckerberg
Overvalued (Score:2)
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Yeah, I'm sure I could ride the pump and dump if I paid attention, but it isn't worth my time to pay attention.
Risk factor #29 (Score:2)
From the list of risk factors:
29. Viruses, hacking, phishing and malware. Oh my.
At least someone has a sense of humor.
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China is telling their bankers to read the FB red hearing as a model to disclose risks.
Of course, they are still not letting their bankers use FB. That would be just too dangerous.
Urban Dictionary definition of "FB" (Score:2)
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EA is on NASDAQ with ticker symbol EA.
Re:I thought Nasdaq tickers were 4 letters? (Score:4, Interesting)
The NASDAQ OMX equities exchanges currently participate in the National Market System Symbology Plan for the selection and use of 1-5 character root symbols, as governed by ISRA, the Intermarket Symbols Reservation Authority.
NASDAQ, NYSE, and other exchanges like to reserve 1 and 2 letter ticker symbols in order to attract big companies to list on their exchange.
F is for Ford [nasdaq.com]
S is for Sprint-Nextel
T is for AT&T
If you poke around, you'll discover companies you've never heard of, but who are major players in their market
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Anyone can open a brokerage account. The problem is that you have to have a brain and/or some education to actually make any good use of it.
(seriously, I opened an account with NOTHING. later, the guy who called to check in asked if all was OK, and it came up that he recommended I put $50 to $200 "within about 4 months" to prevent them from auto-closing it as an inactive/unused account. that's hardly a burden.)
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Hrm? You haven't got their facebook pages handy have you?
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the deliberate use of racial stereotypes implicitly invokes race, and no, pointing someone out as a racist does not make the person pointing it out racist because "only a racist would see all those anti-black stereotypes and know that the AC was insulting black people"
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Struggling to find where the grandparent mentioned race.
Yeah, I looked for it too, didn't see it. I can't remember which comedian said it, but it's not a race thing. Fried chicken is delicious. If you don't like fried chicken, there's something wrong with you.
Dave Chapelle has a bit where he "discovers" the fried chicken stereotype. "Oh man... all this time I thought I liked it because it was delicious. No they tell me it's because I'm black. Good to know." (Paraphrasing of course.)
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Not proud enough to sign your name to it, apparently.
--Jeremy
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What's your point? Do you have one?
If you start putting dates into Wikipedia you'll find lots if interesting things happen on various days, and they mean exactly nothing to things happening on same day, now.
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That would imply he isn't already.
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Re:People still use facebook? (Score:4, Funny)
mostly family or family allies.
What are you, a Lannister?
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That's ok. They'll still have their Like buttons outside of Facebook, and their shareholders, and their corporate partnerships, and their incessant mentions by high-profile users on TV news and shows...
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>*incessant mentions by high-profile users on TV news and shows* //
Don't watch TV and you'll never hear them; nor will the people making those mentions be high-profile to you. Rinse and repeat and those people are no longer high-profile at all.