So, who is buying this? I can see it going up in the (very) short term.

I think the company is worthless but a lot of people are opening brokerage accounts just to buy this, so. worthless or not, I can see it going up.

Staying far away. I think the underwriters had to step in hard to support the price at $38 after it opened.

(Although I gotta admit I'd love to see it zoom up and then buy some long dated puts on it...)

Bloomberg analyst: "Facebook: The largest pump and dump in history"

 

j0n it might be, but what a spot to be in if you are selling.

 

I heard on the radio this morning that all the employees of Facebook will be worth about 2 million each for what stock options they already have.

Q: Why did Facebook go public?

 

A: Because they couldn't figure out the privacy settings either.

Q: Why did Facebook go public?

 

A: Because they couldn't figure out the privacy settings either.

 

j0n it might be, but what a spot to be in if you are selling.

 

I heard on the radio this morning that all the employees of Facebook will be worth about 2 million each for what stock options they already have.

 

Will see what the price is when they CAN sell the stock they will be issued..

 

I have a feeling this would have been a good buy at 38 with an imidiate order to sell at a target price of 42, it would have been a 4 dollar a share gain and all in a few hours the first day. other than that, it doesn't meek my criteria for a stable and worthwhile stock to own, but will see what happen over time. Will see if I kick myself for not getting in on a short term IPO frenzy, or glad I skipped the sinking ship..

I applaud your quickmeme. I couldn't be bothered.

Heh - back down to $38 again.

Actually, I am quite surprised how anti climatic this was. No value investor can come close to being sane while buying it, and the few fund managers (yes, guys who manage millions of dollars plus) that I talked to today, are all out of it. It is back to $38 right now and the underwriting syndicate is heavily trying to keep it above IPO.

 

Quite frankly surprised the dumb money (retail investors) are not stepping in to snap it up, unless they are, and the volume is pretty heavy for it, there are more sellers than buyers. Have to figure out if they dumped the rest of the shares on the open market yet or not.

 

To put this into reality, the company is worth more than google and mcdonalds, is trading 99times forward earnings. (market is trading low teens)

 

Only reason I can think of underwriters supporting this is that they still have unallocated shares they are holding.

 

Biggest organized pump and dump? Perhaps.

 

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, merely my thoughts, I do not own facebook shares, nor do I recommend it to any of my clients. Consult tax professional or your financial advisor.

HD I agree. I wouldn't be buying, but would love to have some to sell if the market ran it up like it was forecasted to possible do.

 

I remember all the dot com's that went bust in the early 2000's. Not a pretty site. Knew a few people who lost chunks of their retirement due to it.

 

If I was to invest money it would be in durable goods or raw materials, both seam to weather the long term outlooks the best.

 

To me day trading is crazy. Just buy something with a good dividend and sit on it. But that is just my opinion.

HD I agree. I wouldn't be buying, but would love to have some to sell if the market ran it up like it was forecasted to possible do.

 

I remember all the dot com's that went bust in the early 2000's. Not a pretty site. Knew a few people who lost chunks of their retirement due to it.

 

If I was to invest money it would be in durable goods or raw materials, both seam to weather the long term outlooks the best.

 

To me day trading is crazy. Just buy something with a good dividend and sit on it. But that is just my opinion.

 

And herein lies the problem. People think day trading is investing. It is not. Day trading is just that, you are using your own strategies in order to notice short term instabilities and momentum in order to capitalize on those trends. It does not matter what it is, stocks, bonds, munis, futures, minis, forex, commodities. You do not care about the fundamentals of the company, you are merely looking at the trading market.

 

70% of daytraders go bust in a year, (ie lose 100% of their money), and 95% within 3 years. Why? Because they cannot disconnect trading from investing.

 

There is a Dalbar study, and a few others, even though the long term returns of indexs are about 7% now, the average investor is 3% or so. Why? Emotion. They keep listening to cnbc, bloomberg and others and are reacting. ie, the same folks who are buying gold.

 

Bulls and Bears make money, Sheep get slaughtered.

I remember all the dot com's that went bust in the early 2000's. Not a pretty site. Knew a few people who lost chunks of their retirement due to it.

 

 

The watercooler effect. People buying crap with their money because they thought they knew how things worked and bought into the hype. Sooner than later, things come back to reality. If people put 10 mins aside and actually opened up a prospectus or an annual statement, they would not be investing in half the garbage that they do.

 

Look at Pandora radio. When it came out, it hit $26 a share. A company, that in their prospectus and statements stated "We are not profitable, nor forsee being profitable in the near future". A year later it is down to $9.85. Still not profitable nor will be.

 

The fact that Pintrest, Twitter and others are looking to monetize themselves should be a warning enough. Is there a business concept there? Sure, but unlike a bank, or McDonalds, the barriers to entry are virtually non existant. Some kid in a basement right now can put Facebook out of business.

 

Prime example of this, Groupon.

 

A fool and their money are soon parted.

 

 

 

If I was to invest money it would be in durable goods or raw materials, both seam to weather the long term outlooks the best.

 

 

Keyword, weather. Long term, they are merely an inflation hedge. Inflation adjusted, you are not making money on these.

 

Look at real estate. Long term, it is merely going to give you the 3% to keep up with inflation.

 

Gold, Silver, Real Estate, Oil, Tech.... all bubbles where pigs (retail investor) got slaughtered.

 

 

Edit: the way you make money is by looking at the investment as a company or as a person. People are far too irrational and as long as you are disciplined, you will be ok. Some examples... during the bank crisis of 2008, when everyone thought every bank would fold, picked up some solid fixed income preferreds yielding anywhere from 25% to 40% annually for 5 years (till they get called) , all Qualified Dividend Rate of 5% , and doubled to trippled on appreciation on the money to begin with.

 

Right now, looking at a certain Spanish bank being thrown out with the bathwather, yielding 13% dividend, which is solidly covered, and only has 15% exposure to Europe, trading at only 5 times forward earnings.

 

Granted, I would never recommend individual securities for 95% of my clients.

I did very well with silver Maks, wish I bought more of it back when I did, but can't complain.

I did very well with silver Maks, wish I bought more of it back when I did, but can't complain.

 

Short term. Silver I actually prefer to gold... but silver became poor mans gold.

 

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=SLV&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p45581966389

 

Silver I mean in my opinion, next bubble to burst, although arguably, it already has. being down nearly 50% from the peak of paranoia.

 

Anyone who bought silver in the past year.... has been hosed. People who bought silver back when it was $12 an oz, are lucky, and those that sold in the mid 40's, once again, when hype was at the peak... were smart.

 

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=SLV&p=W&b=5&g=0&id=p68975278849

 

Whatever you hear on tv.... do the opposite of it. By the time the talking heads on tv are discussing it, it is way too late.

Rumor:

Morgan Stanley, Goldman ended up with 53% of Facebook shares

Rumor:

 

From where? The key to ask is... ended up with 53% of the available shares? on their own books or for their clients? It was over subscribed to as far as I know, meaning clients spoke for them, unless they did not distribute enough to retail accounts and were hoping to own for their own books to flip them.

 

In any case, the private money guys I am chatting with, would not touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Doesn't Zuckerberg still own the majority of the company anyway so it's a moot point?

Yeah, I would assume it's 53% of the allocation for the IPO. As noted, it's a rumor, so could be complete bull.

Not a rumor I dont think. Brokers at MSSB just got a notice that their clients can get reasonable allocations of FB stock.

My friend bought gold a couple years ago and made a killing.

 

Facebook doesn't look like much of an investment... i don't really see the company growing much from this point. If they went public years ago it may have been a good stock to buy(knowing what we know now), but how much more do you think the company will gain from this point?

Yup, got silver for $2/ounce a long time ago, bought a pretty nice gun collection with it!

well, I am not an analyst, but merely have a good understanding of valuations. Facebook already has over 900 million users (3rd largest country in the world.)

They are not likely to go into China, and others have their own networks which work just like facebook. Their new user growth is slowing, and advertisers are pulling out (GM said it was not a good risk/reward for them.)

 

So... for a company trading 99 times forward earnigns, with slowing growth (as per facebook road show to analysts), this is purely a stock to own if you believe they are growing. When it is already the third largest company on the s&p, just how much growth is there?

 

Google is only trading at 18 times forward earnings and a far more diversified model. The hope is, from FB's perspective is because they have so much of your usage data, they have far richer advertising they can sell your usage data for far more money. With Google+ and others.. the price on that will go down in time, no doubt.

 

The Social media ETF is already down about 8% today, as a result of FB entering. While you have an emerging technology with social media, the returns are not all there for investors, as once again, the barriers to entry are quite low.

 

Assuming FB does not grow or shrink from here, are you ready to wait 99 years for FB to repay you your investment? Who knows if it will even be around in 10? Remember MySpace?

Maks, while I did ride a little of the tech bubble on the way up back in the day, I always stayed diversified and while I didn't get out at the top, I didn't ride it to the bottom and still was in the plus.

 

I think more people would be better off investing for the long term and not the quick gain. As you said day trading isn't investing, I see it as a gamble with worse odd than playing the tables in Vegas. While I do watch the markets daily and invest probably 26 times a year I don't do a lot of moving between stocks and funds etc. I'll do that on average on a bi-yearly basis if not once a year overall. That doesn't mean I won't react to something, but I think too many people get way too emotional and don't look into the future enough. You have no idea how many people I know that moved a lot of their money out of funds and stocks into bonds or cash at the lows over the last decade and didn't take the Opportunity as I see it to buy as things were low.

 

For a while my net worth was much lower (heck I lost more money at one point than I ever thought I would be worth) but I bough on the down side and through the turns of the market, heck the down turns I look at my time to increase share balances and as the markets have always done, they bounce back and that increased share balances really play nice with my net worth as things move back up.

 

I wouldn't say I am good at the markets, but I learned a long time ago, well my father taught me, that you can only work so many hours in a day and it's what your money does for you is where you get ahead. I have been doing that and paying myself first and then living off what I have left from the time I was 16. Granted I had a little help until I turned 18, but putting the max into IRA's every single year from the time I was 16 till now at age 46, and maxing out 401K plans from the time I was 20 till now, as well as some other individual investments, well you get the idea.

 

Wish more people learned things like that early in life, and didn't just live for the moment they would be better off. Right now I probably average 2.5 to 3 times in investments per year over what my actual salary is and will be able to retire if I want in under 4 years (arbitrary date, turn 50) and if I averages 4% gains per year, no matter how long I lived I would die with more money than when I retired and that would with me spending about 1.5 times my present salary (pre-tax amount) so any adjustment in lifestyle will only be up from what it is now. SS and my pension will be additional gravy and was never in my plan as a means to fund my future either.

 

You want to know what, this was so simple a plan and I never ever over all the years really did without something, I wasn't even what you would call frugal about it, but you can't beat longevity when it come to investing.

$33 a share now! Glad I didn't buy into that hype!

$33 a share now! Glad I didn't buy into that hype!

 

Same here. At first it interested me, but then I thought back to other IPO's that I took a hit on. Wait a few more days and short it.

dont waste your time speculating, just ask yourself one question....'would I be comfortable putting my credit card number on fb to make purchases?'

 

Resounding answer...hell no....so dont waste your money on this FB crap.

 

the difference is Growth.

 

While those are the current metrics, it does not mean it will stay that way. FB is priced for massive growth, unfortunately, I don't see it, considering they already have 900 million users.

 

If you really want social media done right, LinkedIn. They have a more sound model, and have a lot more growth potential over facebook, a diversified income stream, and a userbase that is willing to pay.