...so did anybody jump in? Probably not. Maybe Troll, 'cause he actually has a PhaseBuk account... Unless they booted his ass off, which wouldn't surprise anybody at BurningJournaldotcom.
Nope! Asshole's dues are so far in arrears...we oughta just kick his ass out! Permanent like.
Good idea. Lemme call Rob right now... Anybody got some change for the phone? I'm all outa quarters... And it's about $3.25/min. ta get Rob on a pay-phone. Not ta mention driving all over hell and creation ta find a pay phone lately! Dammit!
Facebook IPO creates tech giant
Social network site valued at $104b as trading starts today
Here comes Facebook Inc., the $104 billion social network.
In its highly anticipated initial public offering, Facebook sold 421 million shares at $38 each on Thursday. The offering generated $16 billion for the company and its private shareholders in the third-biggest stock debut in history.
The social network is now more valuable than Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. combined. The stock sale sets Facebooks market capitalization at $104 billion. On Friday, shares begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol FB.
Facebook increased the number of shares it planned to sell by 25 percent Wednesday, due to what analysts say has been overwhelming demand.
The Facebook offering trails only Visa Corp., which went public in 2008 to raise $17.8 billion, and the Italian utility Enel SpA, which earned $16.4 billion in 1999, according to Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, Conn., firm that tracks IPOs.
The new shares were being sold by early investors such as Goldman Sachs and venture capitalists like Accel Partners . This is an opportunity to ring the register, said Shawn Kravetz, president of Boston-based hedge fund Esplanade Capital.
David Menlow, president of IPO Financial.com, a company that tracks new public offerings, said that at $38 per share, Facebook is definitely overpriced.
Is it worth this much? No, Menlow said. He said that if the stock doesnt skyrocket in early trading, many disappointed investors could pull out and force it below its opening price by Friday afternoon.
Menlow is confident aboutFacebooks long-term value as an investment. I think youve got some incredibly brilliant people working at this company, Menlow said, and predicted that they would develop new services that would generate a surge of revenues.
But a host of financial analysts are skeptical about the benefits to investors.
Josef Schuster, founder of IPOX Schuster LLC, a Chicago firm that trades in new public offerings, said that the recent sell-off on Wall Street makes Facebook shares far more risky than just two weeks ago.
I think investors are in for a rough ride [Friday], said Schuster. It may rise, but I think the stock may react to 10 days of falling markets. I wouldnt be surprised if Facebook closed flat on the day, or even lower.
The decision to offer more shares, gives a larger group of investors a chance buy into the company, said William Sahlman , a Harvard Business School professor.
As an iconic brand of the Internet age, with more than 900 million users worldwide, Facebook is something that almost everyone might want to have a piece of in their portfolio, Sahlman said.
Web companies that have gone public, such as Amazon.com Inc., debuted on Wall Street with values that were said to be overblown at the time, according to Sahlman.
Yes, [Amazon] was overvalued in 1997, but if you bought it in 1997, you did OK in the end, he said.
Some investors and analysts question Facebooks prospects for growth; growth in revenues in particular. Nearly all of the $3.7 billion in revenue the company earned last year came from online advertising, but Facebook faces serious competition in that arena from search giant Google Inc., among others.
At least one major advertiser will continue to use Facebook, but only for posting its own content. GM said this week it will stop advertising on the social network because it hasnt proven to be an effective platform for paid ads, according to Pat Morrissey, a spokesman for the auto maker. The company has a big Facebook fan following and lots of content on the site, but, Morrissey said, we have not been getting what we want from our advertising.
Although Facebook still has to prove to many advertisers its value, according to Catherine Tucker, associate professor of marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Sloan School of Management, it will soon have the resources to pursue new opportunities.
With the money from the IPO, Facebook will be able to make major improvements, said Melissa Parrish, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge.
The potentially unbelievable amounts of cash will allow them to address some pretty important things, Parrish said. I think we are going to see them make smart use of the money.
Uke said
3:38 PM, 05/18/12
So... No "Not like' button eh? Why not? Ask Zuckerberg. If...hah, you can talk to him... Go ahead, call him. Better yet, shoot him an e-mail!
FACEBOOK FACE-OFF: Steer clear of the hype BERNARD CONDON From Associated Press May 18, 2012 11:15 AM EDT
NEW YORK (AP) EDITOR'S NOTE Facebook begins selling stock to the public Friday in the most talked-about market debut in years. Two Associated Press business writers are debating whether the stock is a smart buy.
First, forget the numbers and go with your gut: Given the breathless press coverage, the ubiquity of its product, the Oscar-winning film about its unlikely success and the rock-star status of its 28-year-old founder, do you really believe the smart folks on Wall Street coming up with a stock price for Facebook resisted the temptation to wring every cent out of buyers?
In investing, hype is the enemy. I was skeptical from the start.
The company listed a range of possible prices for its initial public offering of stock, then raised it, then told us that insiders and early investors would be selling even more of their shares in the offering than they had planned. Now I'm convinced: Don't touch this stock.
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.
To make money in Facebook, you're betting that other buyers will be just as willing as you to hold their nose at the valuation, and keep doing so for years.
Facebook grew its earnings 65 percent last year, faster than at most companies, so you should pay more for it than you would the typical company. But how much more? Profits at Apple grew 85 percent last year. Its stock is trading at 13 times earnings per share.
And while the big profit growth for Facebook is impressive, it's slowing, and has been for three years. Last quarter, the growth turned negative, meaning it fell down 12 percent from the first three months a year earlier.
I think Facebook is one of the best things to happen in America in years. It's an unlikely, brazen success that makes you believe that the nation's best days may still be ahead. A college kid starts an online bulletin board for his classmates in 2004, and now one-seventh of the world's population is using it.
And the company is not just profitable, but incredibly so. Whereas most big, publicly-traded companies have to content themselves with pulling 13 cents of earnings out of every dollar of sales before paying taxes, Facebook gets to keep a seemingly impossible 46 cents.
And therein lies another problem: No company can sustain margins that high for long. If you believe America is a place that gives rise to destructive, capitalistic forces like Mark Zuckerberg, you know those margins are going to collapse, and fast. They are too high not to attract competitors.
What Facebook did to MySpace, a rival yet unknown can do to it. Or a rival suddenly known, like Pinterest.
Not familiar with that company? I wasn't until earlier this year. A sort of online scrapbook, Pinterest now has 10 million monthly visitors, even though its site was launched just in 2009. That early growth is faster than even Facebook's was, according to comScore, a tracker of Internet traffic.
The fact is, the social media industry is too open to competition for comfort. It lacks what Warren Buffett calls a "deep moat" protecting it from rivals. Scoff if you want, but how many college kids can build a rival to Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, a Buffett holding? Where would they get the steel for the lines, much less the men to lay them?
Another problem with Facebook is that the very qualities that made it so successful as a private firm could sink it as a public one.
Facebook says in its IPO papers that it's not about to rein in the sort of rebel culture at the company that has encouraged "innovation" just to deliver "short-term" profits that please Wall Street investors.
If only "short-term" profits were the only demand. When you go public, you are promising investors that your profits will not only rise, but do so consistently, quarter after quarter, in predictable increments. It's a fiction. The nature of many businesses is such that profits come in messy lumps. But companies exploit loose accounting rules, as Wall Street expects them to do, to make their profits seem smoother than they really are.
Is Facebook not going play this game, either? That would be admirable. And disastrous for investors.
I suspect what's got people in a lather about Facebook is that they think it could become the next Google or Amazon. Those stocks went public at high earnings multiples, and still managed to reward investors handsomely.
But the bulls forget the big role played by happenstance and luck in business success, and how difficult it is to separate winners from clunkers ahead of time. And there have been a lot of clunkers: ICG, Priceline.com, Pets.com, Netscape and, more recently, Pandora Media, Demand Media and Groupon. The stocks of those latter three are down more than a third from their IPOs last year.
Maybe this is just a matter of taste. I prefer the dowdy and obscure over the hot and well-known.
But I think there's another distinction here. Facebook is a gamble, a fun fling, like buying a lottery ticket. The valuation is just too high, the unknowns too many, to call it an investment. If you're going to sink money into the company, recognize that much at least. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
...so did anybody jump in? Probably not. Maybe Troll, 'cause he actually has a PhaseBuk account... Unless they booted his ass off, which wouldn't surprise anybody at BurningJournaldotcom.
Nope! Asshole's dues are so far in arrears...we oughta just kick his ass out! Permanent like.
Good idea. Lemme call Rob right now... Anybody got some change for the phone? I'm all outa quarters... And it's about $3.25/min. ta get Rob on a pay-phone. Not ta mention driving all over hell and creation ta find a pay phone lately! Dammit!
Facebook IPO creates tech giant
Social network site valued at $104b as trading starts today
Here comes Facebook Inc., the $104 billion social network.
In its highly anticipated initial public offering, Facebook sold 421 million shares at $38 each on Thursday. The offering generated $16 billion for the company and its private shareholders in the third-biggest stock debut in history.
The social network is now more valuable than Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. combined. The stock sale sets Facebooks market capitalization at $104 billion. On Friday, shares begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol FB.
Facebook increased the number of shares it planned to sell by 25 percent Wednesday, due to what analysts say has been overwhelming demand.
The Facebook offering trails only Visa Corp., which went public in 2008 to raise $17.8 billion, and the Italian utility Enel SpA, which earned $16.4 billion in 1999, according to Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, Conn., firm that tracks IPOs.
The new shares were being sold by early investors such as Goldman Sachs and venture capitalists like Accel Partners . This is an opportunity to ring the register, said Shawn Kravetz, president of Boston-based hedge fund Esplanade Capital.
David Menlow, president of IPO Financial.com, a company that tracks new public offerings, said that at $38 per share, Facebook is definitely overpriced.
Is it worth this much? No, Menlow said. He said that if the stock doesnt skyrocket in early trading, many disappointed investors could pull out and force it below its opening price by Friday afternoon.
Menlow is confident aboutFacebooks long-term value as an investment. I think youve got some incredibly brilliant people working at this company, Menlow said, and predicted that they would develop new services that would generate a surge of revenues.
But a host of financial analysts are skeptical about the benefits to investors.
Josef Schuster, founder of IPOX Schuster LLC, a Chicago firm that trades in new public offerings, said that the recent sell-off on Wall Street makes Facebook shares far more risky than just two weeks ago.
I think investors are in for a rough ride [Friday], said Schuster. It may rise, but I think the stock may react to 10 days of falling markets. I wouldnt be surprised if Facebook closed flat on the day, or even lower.
The decision to offer more shares, gives a larger group of investors a chance buy into the company, said William Sahlman , a Harvard Business School professor.
As an iconic brand of the Internet age, with more than 900 million users worldwide, Facebook is something that almost everyone might want to have a piece of in their portfolio, Sahlman said.
Web companies that have gone public, such as Amazon.com Inc., debuted on Wall Street with values that were said to be overblown at the time, according to Sahlman.
Yes, [Amazon] was overvalued in 1997, but if you bought it in 1997, you did OK in the end, he said.
Some investors and analysts question Facebooks prospects for growth; growth in revenues in particular. Nearly all of the $3.7 billion in revenue the company earned last year came from online advertising, but Facebook faces serious competition in that arena from search giant Google Inc., among others.
At least one major advertiser will continue to use Facebook, but only for posting its own content. GM said this week it will stop advertising on the social network because it hasnt proven to be an effective platform for paid ads, according to Pat Morrissey, a spokesman for the auto maker. The company has a big Facebook fan following and lots of content on the site, but, Morrissey said, we have not been getting what we want from our advertising.
Although Facebook still has to prove to many advertisers its value, according to Catherine Tucker, associate professor of marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Sloan School of Management, it will soon have the resources to pursue new opportunities.
With the money from the IPO, Facebook will be able to make major improvements, said Melissa Parrish, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge.
The potentially unbelievable amounts of cash will allow them to address some pretty important things, Parrish said. I think we are going to see them make smart use of the money.
So... No "Not like' button eh? Why not? Ask Zuckerberg. If...hah, you can talk to him... Go ahead, call him. Better yet, shoot him an e-mail!
FACEBOOK FACE-OFF: Steer clear of the hype
BERNARD CONDON
From Associated Press
May 18, 2012 11:15 AM EDT
NEW YORK (AP) EDITOR'S NOTE Facebook begins selling stock to the public Friday in the most talked-about market debut in years. Two Associated Press business writers are debating whether the stock is a smart buy.
First, forget the numbers and go with your gut: Given the breathless press coverage, the ubiquity of its product, the Oscar-winning film about its unlikely success and the rock-star status of its 28-year-old founder, do you really believe the smart folks on Wall Street coming up with a stock price for Facebook resisted the temptation to wring every cent out of buyers?
In investing, hype is the enemy. I was skeptical from the start.
The company listed a range of possible prices for its initial public offering of stock, then raised it, then told us that insiders and early investors would be selling even more of their shares in the offering than they had planned. Now I'm convinced: Don't touch this stock.
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.
To make money in Facebook, you're betting that other buyers will be just as willing as you to hold their nose at the valuation, and keep doing so for years.
Facebook grew its earnings 65 percent last year, faster than at most companies, so you should pay more for it than you would the typical company. But how much more? Profits at Apple grew 85 percent last year. Its stock is trading at 13 times earnings per share.
And while the big profit growth for Facebook is impressive, it's slowing, and has been for three years. Last quarter, the growth turned negative, meaning it fell down 12 percent from the first three months a year earlier.
I think Facebook is one of the best things to happen in America in years. It's an unlikely, brazen success that makes you believe that the nation's best days may still be ahead. A college kid starts an online bulletin board for his classmates in 2004, and now one-seventh of the world's population is using it.
And the company is not just profitable, but incredibly so. Whereas most big, publicly-traded companies have to content themselves with pulling 13 cents of earnings out of every dollar of sales before paying taxes, Facebook gets to keep a seemingly impossible 46 cents.
And therein lies another problem: No company can sustain margins that high for long. If you believe America is a place that gives rise to destructive, capitalistic forces like Mark Zuckerberg, you know those margins are going to collapse, and fast. They are too high not to attract competitors.
What Facebook did to MySpace, a rival yet unknown can do to it. Or a rival suddenly known, like Pinterest.
Not familiar with that company? I wasn't until earlier this year. A sort of online scrapbook, Pinterest now has 10 million monthly visitors, even though its site was launched just in 2009. That early growth is faster than even Facebook's was, according to comScore, a tracker of Internet traffic.
The fact is, the social media industry is too open to competition for comfort. It lacks what Warren Buffett calls a "deep moat" protecting it from rivals. Scoff if you want, but how many college kids can build a rival to Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, a Buffett holding? Where would they get the steel for the lines, much less the men to lay them?
Another problem with Facebook is that the very qualities that made it so successful as a private firm could sink it as a public one.
Facebook says in its IPO papers that it's not about to rein in the sort of rebel culture at the company that has encouraged "innovation" just to deliver "short-term" profits that please Wall Street investors.
If only "short-term" profits were the only demand. When you go public, you are promising investors that your profits will not only rise, but do so consistently, quarter after quarter, in predictable increments. It's a fiction. The nature of many businesses is such that profits come in messy lumps. But companies exploit loose accounting rules, as Wall Street expects them to do, to make their profits seem smoother than they really are.
Is Facebook not going play this game, either? That would be admirable. And disastrous for investors.
I suspect what's got people in a lather about Facebook is that they think it could become the next Google or Amazon. Those stocks went public at high earnings multiples, and still managed to reward investors handsomely.
But the bulls forget the big role played by happenstance and luck in business success, and how difficult it is to separate winners from clunkers ahead of time. And there have been a lot of clunkers: ICG, Priceline.com, Pets.com, Netscape and, more recently, Pandora Media, Demand Media and Groupon. The stocks of those latter three are down more than a third from their IPOs last year.
Maybe this is just a matter of taste. I prefer the dowdy and obscure over the hot and well-known.
But I think there's another distinction here. Facebook is a gamble, a fun fling, like buying a lottery ticket. The valuation is just too high, the unknowns too many, to call it an investment. If you're going to sink money into the company, recognize that much at least.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
9:56 a.m.
STATUS UPDATE
On Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page, under recent activity, was this, posted shortly after 9:30 a.m. EDT:
"Mark listed FB on NASDAQ."