por admin » Jue May 24, 2012 2:46 pm
Ninguna simpatia por los perdedores que estan enjuiciando a FB, habian demasiadas seniales de que la accion esta sobrevalorada. No pueden quejarse, todo los acontecimientos previos se hicieron publicos. en otras palabras: friegate por idiota, el inversionista tambien es responsable de sus acciones.
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WRITING ON THE WALLUpdated May 24, 2012, 3:13 p.m. ET
Facebook Shows There's a Sucker Born Every Minute By DAVID WEIDNERLike this columnist
If you're one of the shareholders suing Facebook Inc. FB +1.53%because the social-networking company and its underwriters played favorites about disclosing changes to analysts' forecasts, then you deserve to be compensated for your losses or have your trades wiped out if the allegations turn out to be true.
Still, that doesn't mean you aren't an old-fashioned Wall Street sucker.
The reason: You didn't have to follow Facebook's initial public offering with the zeal of Robert Caro to recognize there were significant problems.
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.Consider that as Facebook readied its IPO, there was a lot of shifty business: On May 15, the price was boosted to $38 from a range that bottomed at $28. The next day, the offering size swelled by 50 million shares. Then came a disclosure that insiders would sell 53% more shares, or 84 million shares, in the IPO than previously planned.
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.Sure, there still was lots of interest in Facebook's deal. But the warning signs pointed to a big flush: insiders and longtime investors selling out the maximum number of shares at the highest possible price.
By itself, maximizing returns in an IPO isn't a big deal. It happens every time. Or it should. Big first-day pops are a sign that companies and their investment bankers left too much money on the table.
It's all fine as long as the company has the growth prospects and public interest to at least support the offering price.
Sorry, but Facebook didn't have it.
By the time the shares went public last Thursday and started trading Friday, Facebook was close to becoming a $100 billion company with a price-to-earnings ratio of roughly 100. Those were pie-in-the-sky numbers by many measures.
They were ridiculous when you consider that Facebook reported April 23 that its growth had stalled. Revenue fell 6% in the first quarter. Profit fell 32%.
There were other warnings, too. General Motors Co. GM -0.66%pulled its advertising from Facebook, saying it wasn't seeing a return on its investment. This wasn't the first time advertisers showed skepticism. Facebook itself acknowledged that nearly half its advertisers considered the site experimental.
.In other words, as underwriters were touting the IPO and increasing its size and price, Facebook was acknowledging that it had either hit a rut or that its most robust period of growth—the kind that might support such inflated valuation models—was over.
Here's the upshot of all this: None of these factors was hidden. Facebook disclosed its worries about advertisers. It disclosed its slowing growth and all but acknowledged that it wasn't going to grow and support exponential price growth the way Google Inc. did after its IPO in 2004.
So as the underwriting team led by Morgan Stanley MS -0.67%ratcheted up the price and number of shares to be offered, there was plenty of information available suggesting that those moves were too much. The information was provided by Facebook, and it was the same information that analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS -1.43%and Morgan Stanley used to cut their forecasts for the company.
None of this is to say that Morgan Stanley and Goldman were playing fair. If those firms were telling hedge funds and other favored investors that they expected Facebook not to perform as well as previously thought, that's a serious transgression.
Those of you who didn't have that information have a right to call foul. You have a right to sue.
But let's be honest. Are you really so helpless that you're depending on Morgan Stanley and Goldman to connect that last dot of Facebook's financial picture when 95% of the drawing is visible?
Investing is a significant game of risk. Yes, the underwriters have a duty to disclose information fairly, but investors also have to take some responsibility. There was a lot of smoke and flames coming out of the Facebook IPO story.
Did you really need Morgan Stanley and Goldman to tell you it was a fire?