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winner69
04-02-2012, 04:01 PM
Always interesting to see how people see things like this. The only undisputable fact is that several punters will make zillions as a result of the IPO .... while those who want a bit of the action have to takes their chance

Here's one view as why an IPO
http://technologyspectator.com.au/emerging-tech/social-media/why-facebook-should-ditch-its-ipo

Lance Wiggs in the NBR did a good analysis on Facebook and its metrics and came to the conclusion its not for him. Plenty of nice charts about user numbers and how much profit per user etc

http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/opinion-why-i-wont-be-investing-facebook-no-open-ck-adding-pics-ck-108811

My view - of course the hype will make this a great IPO

Halebop
04-02-2012, 11:12 PM
Agreed. I think a great float to stag if you were lucky enough to get an allocation. ...But a horrible price to pay in the medium term - a lot of growth needs to be acheived to justify the US$75-100b price tag. Still, they make astounding profits for such a young business.

CJ
05-02-2012, 12:36 PM
The only undisputable fact is that several punters will make zillions as a result of the IPO ...There have been a few interesting articles taht have come out about this. Like the grafetti artist who painted the facebook headoffice and took payment in shares. He should make about $200m out of that.

And Bono of U2 fame is to become the richest musician ever. Though more than half his money would have come from Facebook. If money is what defines people, does that make Bono an Investor rather than a musician?


Agreed. I think a great float to stag if you were lucky enough to get an allocation. ...But a horrible price to pay in the medium term - a lot of growth needs to be acheived to justify the US$75-100b price tag. Still, they make astounding profits for such a young business.Agree. I will re-guess closer to the time but my guess is that the first trade will be about 30% higher than the IPO price before dropping down after a day or two or be just higher tha IPO price in the medium term (6 months).

My understanding is that there will only be 5% new shares issued. Added to that, alot of current investors who bought via the secondary market are locked in for about 6 months. As such, there will be very few existing shares being traded and with only 5% new (even if worth $5B plus), the IPO will definitely be great to stag.

CJ
18-05-2012, 07:30 AM
Agree. I will re-guess closer to the time but my guess is that the first trade will be about 30% higher than the IPO price before dropping down after a day or two or be just higher tha IPO price in the medium term (6 months).

My understanding is that there will only be 5% new shares issued. Added to that, alot of current investors who bought via the secondary market are locked in for about 6 months. As such, there will be very few existing shares being traded and with only 5% new (even if worth $5B plus), the IPO will definitely be great to stag.So they are raising $16B at a $104B valuation so just over 15% of the company.

My new guess is a good one to stag but over the next 6 months will be close to IPO value. There will be quite a lot of overhang as there were lots of people who got in early who will want to lock in some/all of the gain. This all depends on what announcements they make over this period. They have the potential to kill Google ads due to much more detailed info on each person.

CJ
19-05-2012, 08:25 AM
My new guess is a good one to stag but over the next 6 months will be close to IPO value. There will be quite a lot of overhang as there were lots of people who got in early who will want to lock in some/all of the gain. This all depends on what announcements they make over this period. They have the potential to kill Google ads due to much more detailed info on each person.It opened up about 10% but looks like the underwriters were doing a lot of buying late in teh day to ensure the price didn't drop below the list price.

I now expect it will go lower next week.

drillfix
22-05-2012, 03:23 AM
I now expect it will go lower next week.

Best gig of all these insto's is playing both sides of the fence by taking the short side to buy it all back again.

You are right though CJ, lower it goes indeed.

As I type:

FB is now $33.63 giving it a loss of -12.04% for today so far, but knows where it will close, plenty of old green on the Dow tonight it seems though~!

CJ
22-05-2012, 06:26 AM
So Zuck is $2B poorer. Big deal. He took $2B off the table at the very high IPO price as did some of the other founders and early investors.

It is the employees with their share options that will be biting their nails. The employees (and some other later investors) have between 3m and 9 month lock-up clauses so they cant sell straight away. This will cause an overhang in the market as most of these will want to cash out a significant portion before the end of the year. Why? because CGT rates will increase from 15% to 30% (I think).

winner69
23-05-2012, 09:21 AM
So Stanley Morgan screwed all in sundry .... prob the world will learn too late that greed is destroying it ... never mind .... as the story says in a years time this weeks events will only be noise

Greed blamed as Facebook shares sink
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10807779

CJ
23-05-2012, 09:53 AM
I also read some of the selling on Monday related to funds wanting to realise losses so they could make a claim against the NASDAQ as they stuffed up the launch - a techincal issue meant some sales orders didn't to though at the openning price of $42.

I find the allocation of blame funny though. Sounds like people were buying as they thought limited supply would pus up the price rather than because they through it was actually worth that much. If they thought it wasn't worth that much, they shouldn't have bought!

GTM 3442
28-05-2012, 04:20 PM
. . . I see their revenue model as not being based around advertising in the future . . .

Interesting that GM agree with you, having decided that Facebook isn't to be part of their advertising mix.

As for identity services, I can't see any government using Facebook as an identity provider. And since governments are the "gold standard" in identity. . . .

winner69
05-06-2012, 08:06 PM
FB at $27 .... what a shocker .... the greedy ones will say 'a well timed float'

I see Groupon is living up to its business model .... latest daily deal is 50% off (the IPO price)

Stranger_Danger
05-06-2012, 10:22 PM
I'm actually very very interested in getting some FB shares. The IPO reminds me a bit of when Google listed - although their book build was pessimistic right out of the traps. The thing is that what Facebook is today is not what it will be tomorrow - same as Google. FB is far more than what it appears - it is not just a social network where people post a bunch of rubbish. Its replacing email as a primary means of communicating with friends and family, its becoming the primary means of connecting businesses directly with their customers, and even more importantly, its becoming the default identity verification and authentication provider of the Internet (which is where the truly big $$$ is going to come from). I see their revenue model as not being based around advertising in the future, but from charging businesses for their commercial pages, and consumers/businesses for identity services.

Any one else with an interest in revolutionary internet technology shifts got any views?

Yes, I'm interested. If there was no major change in fundamentals, I would allocate a decent part of my portfolio at $15 a share.

I have no issue with the business or the management - just the valuation. Still.

Stranger_Danger
27-07-2012, 08:41 AM
Down to $24 after the bell.

Next 2 weeks will be interesting for FB.

Disc : None at this stage.

winner69
18-08-2012, 06:07 AM
Down to $24 after the bell.

Next 2 weeks will be interesting for FB.

Disc : None at this stage.

Still declining .... stranger danger still waiting i hope .... or has this been the biggest con of all time

CJ
18-08-2012, 07:16 AM
The first of the post IPO lockups has just ended. I think an even bigger lockup ends in November. Expect more pressure on the price.

ONly once the lockups are all over will will see a true picture emerge.

winner69
18-08-2012, 08:37 AM
from the SMH

Here's are the closing prices each week since the first day of trading on May 18:

_ May 25: Closed at $31.91, down 17 percent for the week.

_ June 1: Closed at $27.72, down 13 percent for the week.

Advertisement

_ June 8: Closed at $27.10, down 2.2 percent for the week.

_ June 15: Closed at $30.01, up 11 percent for the week.

_ June 22: Closed at $33.05, up 10 percent for the week.

_ June 29: Closed at $31.09, down 5.9 percent for the week.

_ July 6: Closed at $31.73, up 2.1 percent for the week.

_ July 13: Closed at $30.72, down 3.2 percent for the week.

_ July 20: Closed at $28.76, down 6.4 percent for the week.

_ July 27: Closed at $23.71, down 18 percent for the week.

_ Aug. 3: Closed at $21.09, down 11 percent for the week.

_ Aug. 10: Closed at $21.81, up 3.4 percent for the week.

_ Aug. 17: Closed at $19.05, down 13 percent for the week.

Entrep
18-08-2012, 03:57 PM
That plus the amount of data they have on their users is amazing.

Only this is people don't need FB - someone could come along with a better site I believe.

For example, with Google, you could say the same thing, but they are so far ahead I don't think it will happen.

FB is still just entertainment whereas Google is a tool everyone needs.

CJ
19-08-2012, 04:05 PM
One thing I've learned with the Internet is that once these companies have critical mass, they are extremely hard to dislodge. EBay, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn - they will be next to impossible to displace (assuming they continue to innovate and add new features rather than doing nothing for 8 years like Hotmail and MySpace). Lots of people use to use internet explorer (use to have over 90% market sahre and only has its current market share as it is preloaded on all windows computers) to log into AOL, do a search using Altvista or Yahoo, social network on myspace. Bebo was popular a few years ago and could still be now???

They only stay around as long as they keep innovating.

Just off to check my Blackberry - oops I replaced that with an iPhone - but should I get the new iPhone 5 when it comes out or are the new Androids looking better?

winner69
19-08-2012, 07:30 PM
Still has a bit of a way to go catch Groupon but then Groupon has been losing money for investors for nearly a year now

What a disaster these IPOs have been .... the world is still a silly place eh

Entrep
19-08-2012, 10:26 PM
Dont forget Zynga

FB might be a buy once all those escrowed shares come online and can be sold. November is when most of them can be sold I think. Wait around and see if the SP tanks and be there to pick up the pieces.

winner69
12-09-2012, 02:32 PM
From HBR so maybe an academics view but maybe FB will one day be worth not much

Is Facebook Too Big to Survive?
by Jeff Stibel *| * 9:52 AM September 5, 2012

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Back in 2007, I wrote a prediction for my book Wired for Thought that MySpace would soon be overtaken by a little known network called Facebook. Most people, including my Harvard editors, thought I was delusional. MySpace was all the rage and experts were predicting it would overtake Google, Yahoo!, the written word, even communication itself. But just like every social network before it, MySpace flamed out.

Is it Facebook's turn? Facebook went public just three months ago with an initial share price of $38. Less than two months later, it's trading for $18.75. Why is Facebook in a slump? Pundits have suggested myriad reasons including poor investor relations, lack of revenue, and expiring lockups. Last week CNN, along with a host of other sources, argued that perhaps CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the venerable prodigy who built Facebook from the ground up, isn't up to the task of managing a large public company. This week the CFO came under scrutiny from no less than Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. As tempting as it is to place blame on the business, there may be a simpler explanation as to why it's not possible to keep Facebook's valuation at $105 billion indefinitely.

My perspective is that the human brain isn't capable of utilizing a network like Facebook if it grows too large.

To understand why, let's indulge in a little brain science 101: the human brain grows rapidly in infancy, reaches a maximum weight of 1400 grams by the time we are teenagers, and then starts to actually shrink by the time we are twenty. The rapid growth of our early years helps create network connections, just like you do on Facebook. But unlike Facebook, instead of continuing to grow late in life, the brain forges higher quality connections and patterns, losing the vast majority of its early relationships. It replaces sheer quantity of neural connections with quality, making us smarter without the need for additional volume. When the brain stops growing and reaches a point of equilibrium, it gains intelligence.

Virtually all networks have similar limitations. They roughly follow the development pattern of the human brain. For social networks, quantity should only be the goal up to a state of critical mass. Then the goal must be equilibrium, or quality. We find many examples of critical mass in nature and biology. For the human brain it's 100 trillion neuron connections; anything significantly above that number creates disorder. For ant colonies, the magical number is around one million ants. After that, the colony's growth dramatically slows — or worse, the colony fails.

We don't know yet what critical mass is for a social network. We have seen many implode before — remember Classmates.com, Friendster, MySpace? Each of these hit a limit at which point the network became too big, too unwieldy and eventually shrunk into a black hole never to be seen again. At 950 million users, Facebook is clearly pushing some upward bounds.

So how do we know when a social network is getting too big? If it is not the total number of users, then could it be the number connections and friends, currently hovering around 100 billion for Facebook? The answer actually turns out to be a bit of both. For insight, we can again turn to the brain — specifically, neocortical processing (brain math) capacity. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that neocortical processing limits the number of meaningful social relationships a person can maintain. For humans, that number is estimated to be somewhere around 150. This means that it is difficult for you to maintain more than 150 relationships. So in theory, for Facebook, the maximum number of efficient connections is roughly 950 million x 150; anything greater than that will yield an inefficient network that risks implosion.

But Facebook is already well beyond that point. The average Facebook user has 229 "friends" on the site, so it stands to reason that a significant portion of these friends are not "high quality." What's the result? Getting a notification that April Ridmoore downloaded "Call Me Maybe" on Spotify. Who's April? Some girl who went out with your younger brother in high school who "poked" you last year.

To be fair, Facebook has tried to restrict the unfettered growth of its network. They make it easy to turn off notifications, and Facebook has made great strides in putting the kibosh on as many as possible. And the "random" people you encounter on Facebook are generally people you know, people you used to know, or people only one degree of separation from you (unlike MySpace in which users often received dozens of completely random friend requests per week). Essentially Facebook is a "network of networks," making it a smarter — and more successful — social network than all its predecessors.

However, it only takes a few unsolicited, valueless notifications and the utility of Facebook goes down. It is simply inefficient to spend any of your precious neocortical processing capacity finding out about the lives of people who are irrelevant to you — people who will never be one of your 150 meaningful social relationships — even if they are friends of friends.

So what do you do when you find yourself in a network that is too large? One might think the logical thing would be to cull your friends list, unsubscribe from updates, and block all app notifications. But few people do this. Instead, individuals decrease their usage and delete their accounts, ultimately looking for the next new network to hitch on to. Having reached critical mass, the network, like all social networks that came before it, implodes.

But there is an alternative. The brain, after reaching critical mass, starts to shrink. It stops adding neurons and actually loses most of its weakest connections. The brain prunes its weakest links regularly and removes errant neurons in a natural process called cellular suicide. Extraneous information is filtered out and important connections become deeper. We become wiser.

What if Facebook could become wiser? Separate out the fluff and strengthen the important relationships. Allow us to efficiently nurture and groom our packs of 150, our "real" social networks, while filtering everything not directly relevant. Facebook has made some strides on this score, but they must redouble their efforts. It is Facebook's only chance at adding value.

Sauce
12-09-2012, 02:58 PM
Thanks for this Winner
Great article. I abandended a fb page under basically the exact scenario they describe. It just drove me nuts the rubbish that people kept putting on it and it was emailing me about. Especially from my more left wing friends beating on their drums ;)
I wouldn't allow my own experience to bias my thoughts to take this article for gospel. But I think it makes a strong argument. Not that I have an interest in fb as a business so its a moot point anyway.
Regards,
Sauce

Sauce
12-09-2012, 05:48 PM
abandended?

Halebop
12-09-2012, 06:44 PM
abandended?

That's when the lead singer and guitarist no longer get on.

Jay
12-09-2012, 07:57 PM
That's when the lead singer and guitarist no longer get on. :) I like it

winner69
02-02-2014, 08:50 PM
Might be 62 bucks now but these 2 dudes say Facebook gone by 2017

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/22/controversial-paper-predicts-facebook-decline/

A controversial research paper predicting Facebook’s imminent demise spread like an epidemic through the blogosphere Wednesday.

The paper, by two Princeton PhD students, said social media sites like Facebook usually follow the same growth and decline patterns of infectious disease outbreaks. The conclusion: The world’s largest social network will be more or less eradicated within the next three years.

The authors, Joshua Spechler and John Cannarella, cited MySpace, which peaked in 2008 and then rapidly shrunk to almost nothing by 2011.

The paper, which uses Google search query data to determine popularity, said Facebook reached its peak of popularity in 2012 and has already begun its decline. It cited a “downward trend in search frequency” since then.

A Facebook spokesman called the paper “nonsense.” Some experts also cast serious doubts.

When reached for comment, Spechler and Cannarella said they were withholding comment until their paper is peer reviewed.

While the paper’s findings have yet to be validated by other researchers, the level of chatter they provoked Wednesday underscores how under-the-microscope Facebook’s user numbers have become.

The company raised eyebrows during its earnings call in October, when Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman said younger teens were using the service less.

Overall, though, Facebook’s user numbers have been trending upward, with nearly 1.2 billion people logging in at least once a month.

Facebook’s advertising revenue has also been steadily trending north, with some analysts predicting a record $2 billion in ad revenue in the fourth quarter of 2013.

When Facebook discloses its fourth quarter earnings next week, all eyes will be on its user numbers–whether they grow and by how much.

Valuegrowth
07-02-2014, 07:15 PM
Winner69 Thank you for posting above link.

After IPO Facebook’s stock began crashing and l it hit rock bottom at a price of $17.73 on September 4. Those who did some home work grabbed face book from their both hands when others tried to sell their shares. Similarly those who had face book’s shares did not panic like others. Now it is trading around $62.Those who sold face book below $20 have to pay more than $60 to buy it now. At the moment I am using face book to keep in touch with few wonderful teachers living in the USA and UK, friends and relatives etc. After reading above link I feel like doing different types of study on social networks. I use twitter and LinkedIn to keep in touch with some professional people and groups. Have a nice day!

My ideas are not a recommendation to either buy or sell any security, commodity or currency. Please do your own research prior to making any investment decisions.

Dej
20-02-2014, 12:23 PM
Whats peoples thoughts on Facebooks recent announcement to purchase Whatapp for $16 billion dollars?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/19/us-whatsapp-facebook-idUSBREA1I26B20140219

Mista_Trix
27-02-2014, 12:33 PM
Wow. An unbelievable video.

Give this a watch. Looks like a lot of the ad revenue they generate is not necessarily legitimate. Very captivating watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

I really don't see the model lasting if this is the reality of how it actually works, its just a massive house of cards.

Banksie
27-02-2014, 02:32 PM
Interesting video Mista Trix. I don't have any experience with FB advertising so cannot comment its effectiveness. I did, however, find this rebuttal to the video and sounds just as plausible http://www.jonloomer.com/2014/02/11/facebook-fraud-response/.

Valuegrowth
05-04-2014, 05:26 PM
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/04/04/facebook-in-bear-market-territory-as-high-flying-internet-stocks-slump/

Facebook in bear market territory as high-flying Internet stocks slump.

Please note that I do not endorse or take responsibility for material in the above hyper-linked site. Please do your own research.

Valuegrowth
28-07-2014, 09:55 PM
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/24/quartely-earnings-push-facebook-share-prices-to-an-all-time-high/ (http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/24/quartely-earnings-push-facebook-share-prices-to-an-all-time-high/)

Quartely earnings push Facebook share prices to an all-time high

Valuegrowth
13-09-2016, 05:09 PM
http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB?ltr=1

Valuegrowth
22-09-2016, 06:32 PM
Face book stock is not that cheap by most measuring sticks. But some are targeting from 148 to $158. Why is that?


http://www.nature.com/news/facebook-couple-commits-3b-to-cure-disease-1.20649

Facebook couple commits $3B to cure disease

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/facebook-is-debunking-one-of-the-key-bear-arguments

Facebook Is Debunking One of the Key Bear Arguments

Valuegrowth
22-09-2016, 08:00 PM
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-21/world-s-best-performing-tech-fund-is-finally-betting-on-facebook

World’s Best Performing Tech Fund Is Finally Betting on Facebook