Facebook priced its IPO at $38 a share, raising $16 billion which will be the third largest IPO in U.S. history and the largest ever IPO by a U.S. technology company.
It will start trading tomorrow under the symbol: FB
At $38 a share Facebook is valued at $104 Billion dollars.
At $38 Facebook will trade at more than 100x of earnings or PE
For comparison sake here are the some market caps & PE of some other high tech companies based on today’s closing price:
Apple $495 Billion PE 13
Microsoft $250 Billion PE 11
Google $203 Billion PE 19
Yahoo $18 Billion PE 17
Linked In $10 Billion PE 718
I have a huge gambling problem…but FB is NOT worth gambling on!!!
If not already there, we have to be getting close to “peak civilization”.
“BullS” Inc is worth more than all combined.
How is it perfectly rational individuals can look at this offering and not see the pit falls, huge pit falls. I can understand making a bet on a quick jump and getting out but daym son that horse won’t run long.
The next problem is since PE ratio is enough to make my heart hurt the fact they are losing revenue to mobile device use and still havent solved that issue is enough to make their employees cash out too lol
Facebook is about to jump the shark. As you pointed out already Michael, GM has already pulled their advertising money from Facebook and I’m certain others will follow.
Facebook is a beast. Personally, I’ve returned to it after being away from it awhile and plan to stay. It sucks you back in. But, BullS Corporation is the IPO to watch for.
now FB might buy Bing … or Yahoo … or both … and beat Google … 🙂
absolutely Crap
If you have a spare $1,000 bucks I recommend you buy some of facebook at first launch. Sell it within 1-2 days and enjoy the nice profit.
Hype is going to drive this thing sky high within the first 24-48 hours and then it will tank right after that.
If you don’t believe me jsut take a look at the “TICKLE ME ELMO” hype. Everyone wanted it during the release of the xmas season. Right afterwards no one could give a rat’s ass. That’s the same thing going on now.
Enjoy and if you miss out on the first 24 -48 hours don’t say no one didnt warn you.
Aol deja vu
Faces**it will be around $10/share as more lawsuits will be going after them for privacy issues.
Lawyers can’t wait to get a piece of the easy money.
Their servers will crash or get hack and lawyers will have a sugar daddy day.
Robert Cline should know a lot about crap, he’s sitting on over 800 dot co’s. What’s the deal with that jewelry.co sale the .co fangirls were hyping. Has it closed? There’s one truism in the domain game, never take a .Co fan at his word.
I was on top of eBay, Google, and other IPOs, but this one… no thanks.
“… tonight, we’re gunna party like it’s nineteen ninety nine…”
@L
Ha, yep, for those employees who are selling stock, that will certainly be true. On the local news just a few hours ago, I saw a report on how “tech people” are buying homes with cash in San Francisco, with one case, at twice its value. The housing market will certainly spring back here in Silicon Valley, if just for a moment.
That’s real money
Gotta love Capital Markets
$16BN already in the co’s coffers irrespective of what happens post-IPO
Domainers can’t even dream of that kind of money
Most are too busy cold-calling ‘end users’ for dollars
Others will blog for food
Even the FB graffiti artist who got early shares is worth $200M+ at the IPO
And not like Schwartzy’s 20 year plan shit
Buy SmartGlasses for $3000 or whatnot and wait 20 year *hoping* to sell for 6 figures. LOL
Chump change
What a crock
“Entrepreneurs make it happen, domainers wait ’til the entrepreneur makes it happen”
@Aggro fuck you
Go get a life.
I ordered 30,000 shares through Etrade. They allocated me 100. 🙂
Facebook IPO – big f’in deal…old news.
Go to Google News and type in “crowdfunding”…hottest thing to hit the American economy in 100 years. Over 200+ start-ups have sprung up in the past 10 weeks to serve as “funding portals” as per the Jobs Act of 2012 that was signed into law in April. Crowdfunding will all but END the Venture Capital industry as we know it in this country.
Don’t miss the boat…
Money is FLYING into this industry:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/somolend-closes-117m-seed-round-2012-05-15
If not already there, we have to be getting close to “peak civilization”.
—
LOL. True.
I’m starting to think Western Civilization jumped the shark when we landed on the moon. A large group of blithering idiots are going to race each other to pour their money into this mess. That’s is a pretty brutal indictment on our culture.
One thing about American civilization; our citizens are incredibly productive and equally stupid. You go to Europe or Latin America, you don’t encounter the type of intellectual vacancy that you only find here in good old ‘Murikah.
I just heard something on TV, about a place in New Jersey writing $80 tickets for “reckless walking”, which can be charged if a cop sees someone walking and writing a text message. Seriously, the whole ‘seatbelt’ thing was a symptom of a slippery slope that has made this country almost intolerable to live in, for the 10% with enough brainpower to see what’s really going on.
For everyone else? That other 90%?
They’ll just keep working 50 hours a week, spending 80% of their income and “investing” in companies like Facebook and Groupon.
Oops. Typo.
Ouch! Look out below!
Arco- it’s not about Entrepreneurs make it happen, it’s about value makes it happen.
GeoCities, MySpace, Broadcast.com nothing but legalized ponzi schemes
Tony hsieh makes it happen. Jeff Bezos makes it happen. eBay makes it happen. Craig’s list makes it happen. Reed Hoffman (PayPal/LinkedIN) make it happen. Constant Contact makes it happen. Internet Traffic makes it happen. Bobbleheads and American Flags make it happen. Logos.com and Dogwalker.com make it happen. Whiskey.com and Nashville.com make it happen. Fred Mercurio makes it happen. Colin Pape makes it happen. Scott Day makes it happen. TRAFFIC makes it happen. Blogger and WordPress make it happen. Rob Monster made it happen. Michael Arrington made it happen. Matt Drudge made it happen. Catherine Cook made it happen. GoDaddy made it happen. YouTube made it happen. Plenty of Fish made it happen. Wikipedia and Squido made it happen. Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator made it happen. Jessica Jackley of Kiva made it happen. Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia made it happen. Ariana Huffington made it happen. JibJab made it happen. Braden Pollack made it happen. George Pickering made it happen. The Gate58 guys made it happen. Podomatic and SoundCloud made it happen. Fandango made it happen. Skype and Vontage made it happen.
Don’t confuse real innovation that adds sustainable value to humanity to the Tony Sopranos of the net.
As one guy wrote, “Let’s say you have created the most useful, the most beautiful and arguably the most profitable tool in the history of mankind. A device that spans the range of modern human existence from entertainment and communications to business, education and art. A device that has no equal despite ample attempts at imitation and that ceaselessly expands to fulfill needs that you didn’t know you had,” Jon Markman writes for MSN Money which is, yes, a Microsoft-owned and operated website. “‘Well, then,’ the stock market would say. ‘That was nice. What else ya got?'”
But given them Facebook that does none of this and the market could care less what its got. Go figure.
And least we forget Monte Cahn made it happen!
FB is trading with around half the market cap of Google, with only 1/10 the revenue of Google. It would not surprise me to see FB trading below $5 within the next 18 months.
Fail.
The question isn’t whether facebook has value or not. It does. There s no debate there. The question is, will the market assign it a realistic valuation when it’s broken up into wee little pieces and packaged as an equity, then traded on an exchange?
The cCommerce ecosystem runs on entities who can deliver eyeballs to businesses that credibly give a shit about whatever they are selling. FB has analytic filters non the demographic side that are massively superior to Google and they can deliver eyeballs that fit the macro metrics.
Their downside is durability- things change. I believe things are changing on Facebook, too.
There’s also the iron-clad fact that SERP eyeballs come to the doorstep with a very different buying-sentiment than someone who might be peripherally interested in an ad, ancillary to what they’re otherwise doing. Translation: Someone searching for ‘cameras’ in Google is a lot more likely to be a buyer than someone who clicks a camera related ad on Facebook.
It’s the difference between someone walking into a realtor and expressing interest in buying a house, versus someone at Wal Mart shopping for dogfood, being handed a Realtor pamphlet and perhaps making a callback. One lead is *a lot* hotter than the other, Facebook delivers a lot of pamphlets in the right demo zone, but it’s not the same thing as someone who finds you.
The problem here is, none of this is stuff that John Q Public (or even John Q Tech) really understands, or even if they kind of intuitively understand it, they don’t comprehend the implications well enough for the information to be actionable, as far as their making an investing decision.
So, they go with the neat, simplifying ideology that’s been Hoovering up naive investor cash since the beginning; if you understand and like it, buy it! Worked fine in the 1960’s when you were buying detergent companies and pharma, the US economy was on an inescapable upward trajectory and monkeys throwing darts made money but man, in this 21st Century, Tech has gotten so00000 good at buttfucking the markets, those rules don’t apply anymore.
@L,
Decent message, but longwinded. Bottom line, when a company makes the choice to go public, they also choose to try and live up to unrealistic earnings growth targets. FB has an INCREDIBLY high P/E as of Day 1, which means they may deploy capital to try new and risky ventures in order to juice revenues and earnings. These risks could bankrupt them in the long-run, especially considering they HAVE NO MOAT. Anyone can replicate the technology that FB uses, probably even improve upon it.
Disclosure: I am looking for a smart, short entry point. I plan to ride this dog down to 5 bucks.
L –
I have read about 200 articles on FB comparing it to Google and I swear not one put it as well as you did, take a bow.
FB now has roughly 50% the market cap of Google, with 1/10 the revenue. What could possibly go wrong?
Just for the sake of full disclosure I was allocated 350 shares at the IPO price
it’s all downhill from here. the only question is the velocity.
the comparisons to aol are not too far fetched.
their press releases will be interesting going forward since any reasonably good news will send things upward. it’s a pure hype company with pure hype shareholders.
but the hype startegy can only work for so long.
photo sharing is just too easy a “service” to duplicate and there’s not much need for most people to share their personal photos with so many strangers and companies.
facebook’er’s discovering more private ways to share will be like aol’ers discovering there’s a world wide web outside of aol.
@a “will be like aol’ers discovering there’s a world wide web outside of aol.”
It will be interesting to see. But right now it appears that things will gravitate more towards apps, which means less people will be interested in browsing the web like we’ve been doing for the past couple of decades.
Like the beginnings of any industry, where there may be thousands of companies providing products or services, things settle down to where the largest companies are all that really matter to most people, and the smaller ones are either swallowed up by the bigger ones, or they begin to disappear.
I think Facebook has a chance of doing some things that might surprise people, especially with this influx of cash. But I didn’t want to bet on it today. (It’s still barely the 18th here in California.) It was an interesting show to watch, though, as I’m sure it will be next week, as well.
what’s different perhaps is that aol was never easy to switch away from. aol users are feel “locked in” – that is they were reluctant to search for an “isp” and to give up what apl gives them.
not sure we can say the same for facebook. what’s compelling about facebook is not what facebook gives the user. what’s compelling is simply the other people using facebook.
switching away from facebook is as simple as not logging in.
Yes, it’s simple to leave Facebook, but why aren’t people moving to Google+ (or whatever) in droves, then? People get used to a certain comfortable routine, and don’t necessarily want to move to another website that basically gives them the same functionality, only to have to learn the ins and outs of the new site from scratch, all over again.
That said, yes, you don’t have to log in, and that’s been pretty much my routine for my neglected Facebook account. 😉
the alternative hasn’t emerged yet. it will offer something different. privacy.
google plus is just a copy – they offer the same thing. and no privacy.
but what’s really the crucial difference between the two?
facebook was born from a hormone-infused university environment. is has an enormous female audience. girls tell guys to join and they will almost always obey.
this is very powerful.
google plus, while it might actually be technically superior, has nothing like that. if g+ could lure facebook’s users away, they would crush their competitors. because the totality of historical data (search, gmail, etc.) that g has on users which they could combine with social networking data would have no equal.
it would be game over.
If people want privacy, they can stick to things that have worked for years, like the phone, email, or invisible ink. Or locking themselves in a room. But even none of those things are guaranteed. (We know what Howard Hughes did locked away from the world in his later years, for example.)
But Facebook has proven that no matter what they say, people who have an account there don’t really want privacy. They want everyone to know what they did over the weekend. Or what they ate for breakfast. Or the latest STD they were lucky enough to catch the night before. If they wanted some resemblance of privacy, they wouldn’t be on Facebook in the first place.
In any event, and you should never do what a girl tells you to do, anyway. Girls, (again, no matter what they say), like exciting bad boys who don’t listen to them, and who make them feel insecure and unappreciated. So don’t join Facebook because a girl tells you to, unless you don’t mind being ‘friend material’ for the rest of your life, destined to periodic highly-emotional calls from your ‘friend’ every time one of her dream guys dumps her.
I mean, unless you’re into that sort of thing, of course.
sell short
my view is that people use facebook for doing the things you mention without worrying about privacy because they are not aware of how to do the same things without telling facebook, facebook’s advertisers and the rest of the internet at the same time. they have not been given a viable choice of alternatives.
no one has yet made an _easy to use_ alternative to facebook that uses a different approach which ensures a similar degree of privacy to what we enjoyed with the older methods of communication, such as the ones you mentioned.
if such alternatives never appear, facebook is a sure bet. so if we’re facebook all we need to do is make sure there is never demand for an alternative. is that feasible?
i guess it depends on how much you know about the exisisting alternatives to communicating via the internet but not via someone’s public website as people do with facebook. developers are right now working on making such alternatives as user friendly as facebook. they are being funded by vc, just like facebook was. there will be competition. and that’s probably a good thing.
so i guess we’ll just wait and see.
as for your bad boy comment, if you ignore what women tell you to do, you are in a very small minority. that’s just the reality of a college campus, not advice. i’m only explaining how facebook was able to grow in its early stages. if you know the history behind facebook you know it started life as a hotornot clone. if you are a facebook investor you should know these things.
the growth facebook gets now is of course much different. so many different demographics. people join for all sorts of reasons, many of them are business related. however the peer pressure i mentioned still exists. and not just with college students. there are guys using facebook who would never join on their own. some were the very definition of the bad boy in college. today they are viewing facebook through their wife’s account. go figure. 😉
“sell short” – Robert Cline
Well, guess its time to go long.
“I think Facebook has a chance of doing some things that might surprise people, especially with this influx of cash.”
What is it that they need this influx of cash to do, exactly?
Maybe I’m overly simplistic, but my understanding of “why does a company go public” is to raise operating capital. What is striking about these tech IPO’s are the stories of how much money is simply going to end up in the pockets of various principals and insiders. The entire game seems to be one of “cashing out” after an enterprise has reached or passed its peak, and leaving investors holding bags of smoke.
Looks like the investors are bailing. I put in a market order for my 100 shares yesterday when the price was $39. 3 minutes later I executed at $38.80.
fb is worth < than $1
piece of crap.
make sure to kick me back some of your earnings from my advice to short yesterday.
@ John Berryhill “What is it that they need this influx of cash to do, exactly?”
More hoodies? My later posts on this whole thing got a bit more tongue-in-cheek as they went along… although my first post, where I said “no thanks” to this IPO, was totally serious.
Wow its down almost 12% . Did they even shift the whole IPO stock yet ?
Bought 25k FB $34.35
Good Luck to All
it’s like a pyramid scheme!
it’s almost as clever as mortgage-backed securities.
welcome to the casino.
good luck.
FB is indeed a horrible organization, but I fear that
those who are shorting them are going to get caught
out!…
Facebook knows when you took a dump, that data equals money. Calling the IPO a failure is ignorant. This freakin company has a market cap of $100 billion and on the surface it’s mostly filled with people posting pictures of their puppies. They maximized the amount that they could raise, and they don’t give a sh*t if it pops on the opening day.
To make good money they will need to completely change their “business model”
I read they have nearly reached a “plateau” as far as USA users…(What now…Angola?)
Their Mobile approach stinks when it comes to search(loading loading loading) …
They get 500 clicks every I million visits
They better have an Ace up their sleeve pronto …or the stock will be “up the creek”
I feel better now.
I call Tucows a better buy (riskier for sure ) and a target for a takeover
“Calling the IPO a failure is ignorant. This freakin company has a market cap of $100 billion…”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
FB’s market cap is down to roughly $90 billion on the first trading day after the IPO. At this rate, in 9 more days, it could be a zero.
a mkt cap of 100b. with annual revenue of 1b.
is this some sort of magic trick?
cool!
actually it’s 1b net income. which is probably a quarter of their total revenue. clearly this changes everything. strong buy!
not.
Dude the fb ticker is now showing $33 price tag.