bid/ask

5/18/2012 3:58:15 PM

Good thing I got those 50 shares at the IPO price. Now I can shop for vacation homes with my $11.59.

5/18/2012 4:02:20 PM

well underwriters did their job.....+0.61%

certainly no linkedIN or anything to brag about

Will be interesting to see if more buyers (retail) come in on Monday to buy this stock

5/18/2012 4:04:48 PM

How much of the greenshoe oversubscription just got wiped out there though??

The underwriters are probably almost flat by now, that takes away the support...



For clarification. Underwriters can naked short the stock. So they sell an extra 10-15% of Facebook at the IPO price of $38. So they're short the stock. They place a huge bid at $38 to cover their shorts and get flat.

This just lets you know they KNEW $38 was the top of the range. They aren't going to short it if they think they'll get hammered.


[Edited on May 18, 2012 at 4:11 PM. Reason : a]

5/18/2012 4:08:06 PM

underwriters shorting their own IPO stock (which they supported the IPO price at least 3 times) on launch day? Would be a very very bold move indeed.

5/18/2012 4:24:35 PM

Quote :

"A greenshoe (sometimes "green shoe"), legally called an "over-allotment option" (the only way it can be referred to in a prospectus), gives underwriters the right to sell additional shares in a registered securities offering at the offering price, if demand for the securities exceeds the original amount offered. The greenshoe can vary in size up to 15% of the original number of shares offered. The greenshoe option is popular because it is one of a few SEC-permitted means for an underwriter to stabilize the price of a new issue post-pricing, and it presents no risk to the underwriter. Issuers will sometimes not permit a greenshoe on a transaction when they have a specific objective for the offering and do not want the possibility of raising more money than planned. The term comes from the first company, Green Shoe Manufacturing now called Stride Rite Corporation,[1] to permit underwriters to use this practice in its offering. The SEC also permits the underwriters to engage in naked short sales of the offering. The underwriter creates a naked short position either by selling short more shares than the amount stated in the greenshoe option, or by selling short shares where there is no greenshoe option. It is theoretically possible for the underwriters to naked short sell a large percentage of the offering.[2] The SEC also permits the underwriting syndicate to place stabilizing bids on the stock in the after-market.[3] However, underwriters of initial and secondary offerings in the United States rarely use stabilizing bids to stabilize new issues, and instead engage in short selling the offering and purchasing in the after-market to stabilize new offerings. "Recently, the SEC “staff has learned that in the US syndicate covering transactions have replaced (in terms of frequency of use) stabilization as a means to support post-offering market prices. Syndicate covering transactions may be preferred by managing underwriters primarily because they are not subject to the price and other conditions that apply to stabilization."[4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenshoe



When people are popping up on brentroad.com saying they were able to get an allotment of shares to one of the biggest IPO's in history, you can bet they were overalloting shares, and I bet they were naked shorting too.

They knew this was the perfect IPO to rip the public off on. Why else didn't they underprice the shares for the pop?? Why would they boost the price $6-$8 last night?!

I'll give you a hint. They knew the public was buying the stock no matter what the price/valuation was. You can see why institutional buyers weren't interested.

[Edited on May 18, 2012 at 5:01 PM. Reason : a]

5/18/2012 4:50:17 PM

Well, that was fun. Lost about $1/share in the matter of one afternoon on ZNGA. It tripped the breakers twice! What a pathetic IPO from FB

5/18/2012 5:03:58 PM

^ It wasn't pathetic for Facebook or the banks. It was wall street giving a big eff you to investors.

They know they've sheared the sheep one too many times and that retail investors aren't coming back anytime soon, so this was one last chance to completely ramrod them.

Quote :

" Risk to Investors Underwriters' abilities to stabilize a stock's price is finite both in terms of the number of shares the underwriters sold-short, and the length of time over which they choose to close their positions. "Regulation M defines this type of share repurchase as a syndicate covering transaction and imposes the same disclosure requirements as those imposed on penalty bids. Consequently, investors need not be informed that an offering is or will be stabilized by way of a syndicate short position. Rather, investors need only be exposed to language indicating that “the underwriter may effect stabilizing transactions in connection with an offering of securities” and a characterization of possible stabilization practices in the “plan of distribution” section of the prospectus."[6] The SEC currently does not require that underwriters publicly report their short positions nor short-covering transactions. Investors who are unwary of underwriter stabilizing activity who choose to invest in what they perceive to be a stable issue can encounter volatility when the underwriters pause or complete any stabilizing activity. "Cast in the most negative light, price stabilization might be seen as a means of transferring risk to a relatively naïve segment of the investor population."[7]"

[Edited on May 18, 2012 at 5:09 PM. Reason : a]

5/18/2012 5:07:57 PM

So do you think FB will continue to fall on Monday?

5/18/2012 5:14:09 PM

Hard to say...

I mean from the looks of things once the support goes away the stock could get ripped. But this was also a terrible week in the markets so maybe the whole thing bounces and facebook rides the wave.

Seems like a shitty time to own any stocks though, so im definitely not going to hold a frothy one like FB right now.

Im just glad gold found support and bounced. Only thing I'm comfortable owning.

5/18/2012 5:18:35 PM

That was a waste of time.

5/18/2012 8:01:09 PM

.

[Edited on May 19, 2012 at 10:40 PM. Reason : .]

5/19/2012 10:31:48 PM

ABT - Abbot Laboratories has held strong for me over the last 20 years or so, they're at 61 right now and have consistently split around 70-75 for as long as I've held it. if you're looking for a decently stable company to invest in they've been on a steady rise since early 2011

5/20/2012 12:49:12 AM

nothing like a steady company to get the juices flowing amongst 25-35 year olds!


"Earn 5.5% a year retire a millionaire if you make $45k a year for 30 years!"

5/20/2012 3:36:12 AM

knock it all you want, but a good portfolio should have a mix of risky investments and stable companies, you just said yourself that this doesn't seem like a good time to own any stocks, why not pump some funds into a good stable company while the market is being shitty instead of losing money the next time gold crashes

5/20/2012 4:50:52 AM

^ haha i actually agree with you. But this thead is full of gamblers. People buying options, crazy pipedream companies like First Solar, etc...

Not a whole lot of people discussing Coca Cola or McDonalds

5/20/2012 6:19:56 PM

I've been eyeing McDonalds and Cat for a while. I also own IBM, GOOG, VZ, TEVA, and a bunch of other stable mutual funds.

5/20/2012 10:12:14 PM

$fb trading down in the low $37s this morning - well off the ipo price.

5/21/2012 8:47:59 AM

Dropping like a Rock ... no believers!!

5/21/2012 9:45:20 AM

Guess this proves against the secondary market concept. Just because you can buy in before the IPO does not mean you should

"SharesPost Financial Corporation completed its auction on March 30, 2012 of 150,000 units of an investment vehicle designated to hold shares of Facebook, Inc. ("Facebook"). A clearing price of $44.10 per share was established at this auction.

Barring something entirely unexpected, this will be our final auction of the shares of Facebook. We would like to thank the more than 1,100 institutions and individuals who participated in our Facebook auctions, resulting in total share and unit sales of more than $425,000,000 (valued at today’s closing price), making SharesPost the most active auction platform for Facebook shares. We look forward to serving your interests in the many other companies in which SharesPost currently facilitates transactions and in the emerging private capital markets."

5/21/2012 10:02:28 AM

Shear the sheep!

5/21/2012 3:01:58 PM

Facebook Bankers Secretly Cut Facebook’s Revenue Estimates In Middle Of IPO

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/facebook-bankers-secretly-cut-facebook-revenue-estimates-middle-133648905.html

5/22/2012 12:36:57 PM

i scalped $fb for 75¢ this morning. it wound up going up over a $1 after i sold, but holding that stock is scary. i read somewhere that someone (reuters?) had put a $9.xx fair-value target price on it based on future sales/revenues.

5/22/2012 12:48:27 PM

^^ disgusting. They wonder why retail investors refuse to participate in the stock market anymore.

It's gotten GROSS these past few years.

5/22/2012 1:21:26 PM

Wow, Facebook has announced they will begin paying dividends in 2013.





Oh wait, in Farmville credits, not cash.

5/22/2012 1:41:41 PM

Haha. I guess I'll just hold for now. The benefits of being young.
On an unrelated note, how much international exposure do you guys have, in %, and where?

5/22/2012 2:18:09 PM

Janus Overseas

5/22/2012 3:32:13 PM

^^ Right now 0%. Hate foreign markets. Europe is doomed, China and Brazil are bursting, etc..

Not many places to hide in a global meltdown and currency crisis. Now is the time to protect your wealth, not buy speculative stocks in Taiwan.

5/22/2012 3:43:08 PM

And so it begins...
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-zuckerberg-banks-sued-over-130237689.html

Quote :

"(Reuters) - Facebook Inc and banks including Morgan Stanley were sued by the social networking leader's shareholders, who claimed the defendants hid Facebook's weakened growth forecasts ahead of its $16 billion initial public offering. The defendants, who also include Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, were accused of concealing from investors during the IPO marketing process "a severe and pronounced reduction" in revenue growth forecasts, resulting from increased use of its app or website through mobile devices. Facebook went public last week. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to a law firm for the plaintiffs. A day earlier, a similar lawsuit by a different investor was filed in a California state court, according to a law firm involved in that case. In the New York case, shareholders said research analysts at several underwriters had lowered their business forecasts for Facebook during the IPO process, but that these changes were "selectively disclosed by defendants to certain preferred investors" rather than to the public generally. "The value of Facebook common stock has declined substantially and plaintiffs and the class have sustained damages as a result," the complaint said. Representatives of Facebook and Morgan Stanley did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Facebook shares fell 18.4 percent from their $38 IPO price in the first three days of trading, reducing the value of stock sold in the IPO by more than $2.9 billion. "

5/23/2012 10:40:33 AM

5/23/2012 10:55:43 AM

Oh man, this facebook mess is getting interested. I bought a few shares last week because I had some extra cash in my brokerage acct from credit card reward points, figured why not? Guess I am going to be in this for the long haul

5/23/2012 11:26:27 AM

Quote :

"Guess I am going to be in this for the long haul"

Yeah...grab a snickers.

I'm working on a shareholders lawsuit right now that was filed in 2008. I seriously doubt it gets settled before the calendar year is up. It won't go to trial, but this fucker keeps getting dragged out.

5/23/2012 11:28:37 AM

just quoting face's post at the top of page 5 from May 14th for the heck of it:

Quote :

"um, if you can get in on Facebook at the IPO price you buy as much as humanly possible. I can't see any circumstance where it doesn't pop 30% and it could possibly double. "

Was talking to a guy elsewhere that said he felt sorry for the people that bought. I told him I don't, they made an incredibly poor investment decision. "Fools and their money..."

5/23/2012 1:36:37 PM

Ibf face says that comment was made before the offering price was raised.

5/23/2012 1:50:55 PM

Maybe he somehow confused the facebook IPO with gold bullion?

5/23/2012 1:55:05 PM

^^ well he did say "I can't see any circumstance..."

I just never got the value people thinking Facebook had. "It's all based on the ads on the right side of the page." The same ads me and everyone I know ignore and only click on by accident? And that's going to grow exponentially as Facebook is near its peak user count?

Big fan of Barry Ritholtz:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/05/how-facebook-fucked-up-its-own-ipo/

Quote :

""What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me— nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so." -Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 Ahhh, the delicious cruelty that is irony! The ineffable loss, the sadness at the sudden realization that this was your own doing — an easily preventable mistake, that harsh painful sensation in the pit of your stomach when you realize that you have no one to blame but yourself . . . Our story so far: Facebook, a wildly overvalued momentary internet phenomena led by an arrogant 28 year old man-child, decided to treat the process of going public with the same respect they do their users’ privacy, which is to say, with none at all. So they went public more or less unlawfully over the past two years, allowing 1000s (or more) outside investors to acquire substantial stakes via secondary markets from their employees and early investors. Note this is within the company’s control, and could have been stopped, but they elected not to do so. When the clamor to dump shares overwhelmed these markets (but not the hype surrounding them), FB decided to do what was described as an IPO, but was in all actuality a secondary. Flattered and cajoled by the bankers and wankers at Morgan Stanley and Nasdaq respectively, the man-child allowed the Facebook secondary to be bungled by these once-great-now-shite financial firms. How? Let’s begin with Morgan Stanley, who wildly over-priced the offering price (and size) by about 4X. They were hemmed in by the inefficient, opaque, clumsy secondary markets that had originally over-priced FB’s shares. Forget $25B, had Morgan Stanley told the man-child and his team that a $40-50B cap was more than reasonable, they would not have gotten the deal. Hence, the once esteemed bankers, down from $100 in 2000, now trading at a paltry $13, have become a shadow of what they once were and were worth . . . So they took the deal. Then, while Facebook was on the road presenting to institutional investors, Morgan Stanley’s consumer internet analyst actually cut revenue forecasts for the company (Basis: FB’s latest SEC filings). I cannot recall that ever occurring during an IPO roadshow. With the stock over-priced due to the secondary markets and relentless media hype, and the lead underwriter telling the company what they wanted to hear, the next decision was to hand over the stock to an exchange. The choice was between two utterly corrupt institutions — the NYSE or the Nasdaq. Given that both entities had sold their souls long ago to the HFT traders, with their co-located servers and algorithms, it looked like the choice didn’t matter all that much, since each appear to screw over investors equally, allowing front-running by HFTs and other should-be-illegalities to occur. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the Nasdaq was the wrong choice. Without a specialist to deal with the onslaught of 1000s of spoof quotes per millisecond via HFT algorithms, their systems was overrun by the bots. Here is the FT’s take: “The question now will be: was Nasdaq the victim of catering to its best customers, the high-frequency dealers who provide the liquidity that attracts investors to the market, who wanted to keep cancelling quotes at millisecond increments during IPOs?The rationale for the design of Nasdaq’s IPO cross system was that IPOs, unlike normal opening and closing auctions, have no pre- or after-market trading. Therefore, IPO prices could fail to reflect where the market really stands, and add risk to market-makers. The irony here is that Nasdaq has also been among the exchanges leading the charge to try to damp down excessive cancellations, in cases when there are more than 100 quotes per actual trade executed. In the case of cancellations, it is traders’ software – their algorithms that make trading decisions – that is in question; whether poor design makes them wasteful with their trading messages.” What was that about HFTs being there to add liquidity? (Please tell me that the FT was being snarky). Nanex explains this further: "Only High Frequency Traders (HFTs) can cancel quotes at that rate. And ironic enough, it was mostly HFTs that benefited later when Nasdaq quotes stopped coming from the Securities Information Processor (SIP) which transmits quotes for everyone who doesn’t get the premium direct feeds. The nearly 2 hour outage, from 11:54 to 13:50 (See Charts at link). Those who are co-located and get the direct feeds, namely HFTs, didn’t experience this problem, as trades continued to come from Nasdaq." So even the choice of exchange worked to screw this up yet further. While the NYSE still engages in the same sort of HFT shenanigans Nasdaq does, the specialist could have controlled the high frequency firehose, electing to turn it off (or just ignore it) in order to make an orderly IPO market. ~~~ Thus, what we see are a series of bad decisions made by Facebook’s executives going back many years. The insiders got greedy, too clever by half, in how they used secondary markets. They picked a bad banker and an awful exchange. The stock broke syndicate on Monday morning, and I would not be surprised to see it eventually cut in half from the way-too-high offering price. Compare the Facebook IPO with that of Google — there is a world of difference between the business models, earnings at IPO, valuations and multiples. Een the Dutch Auction process Google championed had worked out well for all involved — especially retail investors. What a piece of work is man, indeed . . ."

[Edited on May 23, 2012 at 2:05 PM. Reason : /]

5/23/2012 2:04:40 PM

5/23/2012 3:36:36 PM

Holy quote out of context batman! I can't believe you're trying to act like I was wrong when I coudn't have been much more accurate.


Let's look at the entirety of my statements.

Quote :

"um, if you can get in on Facebook at the IPO price you buy as much as humanly possible. I can't see any circumstance where it doesn't pop 30% and it could possibly double."

At the time of this quote the IPO price range was $26-$32. The stock went to $42 even though they raised the SIZE of the offering and sold an additional greenshoe offering. $42 is a 31%-62% gain. There were tons of limit orders in the $60's too, so without raising the SIZE of the offering those COULD have been hit and there's your double up.

Quote :

"this thing is going to be oversubscribed like a mother. "

It was severely oversubscribed. So instead of allowing the stock to pop and generate buzz, Facebook and the underwriters chose to unload as much of this dog company as they possibly could in one jolt. They raised the SIZE of the offering and the underwriters still oversold it with the greenshoe.

Quote :

"I'm not saying hold the thing 5 years, just hold it 10 minutes and you are guaranteed to make money."

Read this quote again. I was bearish on the stock. I don't bet on stupid momo 100 P/E stocks. But if I could get in at 30 on the IPO when you know it's going to 40, why wouldn't you???

Quote :

"Looks like they bumped the price and the size of the offering. Not going to get as big of a pop because of it probably. Still going to be a winner for the day though."

Ding ding ding. Once they bumped the IPO price and the SIZE of the offering obviously you can take doubling off the table. It wasn't going to go to a $200B valuation by 10 AM. It still went from $38 to $42 which is a 10.5% gain. That's still a huge win for one day if you were lucky enough to get in on the IPO price. Not sure why you would have held it beyond that really unless you just want to own the stock. It was pretty clear that once the underwriters $38 bid disappeared that this stock had a lot more downside than upside in the near term.

[Edited on May 23, 2012 at 5:30 PM. Reason : a]

5/23/2012 5:25:59 PM

looks like face is right again.





also, let's get ready for another fsi rollercoaster. i'll be waiting in the valley with my green

5/23/2012 6:58:12 PM

Anybody here own any OCZ?

picked up some shares

[Edited on May 23, 2012 at 9:48 PM. Reason : ]

5/23/2012 9:47:40 PM

HURRICAN BUD FORMS OFF COAST OF MEXICO
http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2012/05/23/forecasters-say-tropical-storm-bud-is-nearly-hurricane-as-mexico-issue-storm/#ixzz1vktaKQ8V?test=latestnews

5/24/2012 10:26:04 AM

market will be blown away

5/24/2012 10:29:50 AM

lol

5/24/2012 10:31:05 AM

I'm pretty sure that Rick Santelli is legitimately retarded and that CNBC only keeps him on to meet some kind of minority quota.

5/24/2012 11:13:24 AM

Sorry I was aiming for the tropical weather thread.

5/24/2012 11:26:27 AM

Hurrican alert for the stock market.

5/24/2012 11:32:01 AM

Thinking about buying an ounce of shares in MJNA. Anyone think it goes higher?

5/25/2012 12:36:55 PM

lol FB. where do you think it stops?

5/29/2012 12:28:26 PM

How many retirement funds got dumped into FB, thinking it was "the deal of the century"?

[Edited on May 29, 2012 at 12:33 PM. Reason : ]

5/29/2012 12:32:27 PM

where/when does this FB drop stop? $20? $15? a serious LOL at anyone who got in on the IPO w/o the intent on selling w/i a few hrs.

5/29/2012 1:53:30 PM