1. Say goodbye to the individual investor on Wall Street. Whatever positive impression they had of the IPO market and the stock market in general was just torched to the ground. When everyone you know associated with the stock market is telling you and the media is confirming that this could be a huge IPO that will make money for those lucky enough to get shares and the opposite happens, goodnight. All confidence in the stock is destroyed. Put your money in the bank or if you want to gamble, at least slot machines in Vegas pay out 98pct.
2. The Valuation Bubble in Silicon Valley is bursting – but not for the reasons you think. Historically IPOs function as a means of getting stock to outsiders. People who were not sold/assigned/granted shares could only buy shares once they reached the public markets. The new secondary markets in private shares changed that. They allowed outsiders to purchase shares in a market with very little liquidity.
The demand for shares outstripped the supply and you know what happens when demand outstrips supply ? The price goes up. So shares of FB on secondary market went up and up and up. (Just as LinkedIn had done before them, but it greater volumes) When it was time to go public the IPO had to be priced higher than the prevailing share price on the secondary market.
To make matters worse, those folks who bought shares in the secondary private market, driving up the share price now had the shares they wanted to buy , so they were no longer going to be the buyers the IPO counted on to eat up shares in the open market.
Can you imagine how pissed you would be if you bought a boatload of Facebook thinking you got in at a better than IPO price only to watch the price on the open market post IPO drop below the price you paid in the private market ? Ouch.
The law of unintended consequences is that the dynamics for how private companies are valued and are able to raise Pre IPO rounds could quickly change if the prices and volumes on SecondMarket and its competitors declined significantly.
3. I always laugh at all the pundits /analysts who try to tell you what any non dividend paying stock is worth. Its a function of supply and demand. Its never fundamentals. Read what I wrote a long time ago about the stock market. In the case of facebook they put an ENORMOUS number of shares into the market. Too much supply. Valuation has no relevance what so ever. Conventional wisdom says the buyers of stocks will try to determine the value of a stock before they buy or sell and make the appropriate rational decision. Not even in a Richie Rich cartoon does that happen.
NOTE: Marc is long 150,000 FB at around $32.
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