I suppose the short will be on, but the prebuyers, and secondary market gobblers of the past few years, will flood the market with shares. Who then from the IPO side are gonna be the huge buyers to stabilize the stock? Answer that, and there might be your strategy.

I am just a watcher, their fundamentals are terrible. And I was around for the 90's tech bubble.

This is true. Remarkably dumb management decisions will make customers angry and cost the company money.

Now why do you think management would make this remarkably dumb decision?

I think I'm going short, I just haven't figured out when I'm getting in the game yet. I simply find it hard to believe that we won't see a completely different trend at some point in the future (perhaps years down the road). The only way to prevent this from happening is if Facebook can buy every legit threat to their business, ala Microsoft and create a Monopoly.

Keep in mind that Facebook is only floating a small share of the company (just like Groupon, etc). The banks they hired are hired to make sure that the stock doesn't tank (hurting the prospects of future share floats) and also doesn't skyrocket on day 1. (leaving free money on the table) If either of these happens it would be bad for Facebook.

Both viddy and socialcam are spreading like wildfire only because they are stealing all the content from youtube, cloaking content behind their apps, and spamming people's whole facebook account to get more views and clicks.

So yeah, they took off just like the 'Social Readers' took off for a month or two before everyone got sick of their BS and FB decided to give them less prominence on the site because of all the complaints.

the only thing im looking at it is if im going to be shorting facebook. Gaurenteed they are going to get way overpriced for the same reason a lot of tech companies do.

Still with amazon being a much better short right now, im probably not going to bother doing anythoing with facebook.

Don't know how common this is, but my money manager told me he could get me IPO shares if I wanted. Not sure if that's a good sign or a bad sign, or no sign at all.

I decided to pass. The stock will probably pop 40% on day one, but it doesn't matter. It's way overpriced here. I think Zuck will figure it out longterm, but they're a dog to Google at the moment on every metric, and I would just rather play safer bets.

Ezra

FB just needs to figure out how to monetize their user base a little better and they'll be worth a ton.

I'm throwing 15k at it. Would have thrown 40k but lost 25k due to a bad business deal two months ago.

Willing to risk quite a chunk of it, even if I lose 30% of it in 2 hours I won't be upset as it's not a large % of my assets. Just not sure if I'm going to buy right near the open or wait for a dip and then a runup.

I'm leaning towards dip and runup. We'll see Friday.

if you can put this into more concrete terms there's a good chance i'll take the other side of your "guarantee"

There are two scenarios:

1- Zuck one day releases a statement saying that in a month's time all Instragram pictures will be automatically synced with your Facebook profile. All of the tech hipsters will shout from the mountaintops and then a few days later there will be an option to stop the syncing within FACEBOOK's privacy tools. BUT the syncing option will be automatically turned on unless you change it yourself.

2- Zuck gradually plucks the top talent from Instragram to have them work on their own mobile platform while they keep Instragram static until it is left behind just like the Flickr story at Yahoo. In this scenario Instragram will be a ghost town in 2-3 years time.

There are no incentives to let Instagram continue to innovate and beat Facebook's mobile platform. These are the only two scenarios that make sense to me.

Ur, if you can actually get IPO price shares, it might be worth it - given you aren't resigned to a lockup period.

If you can get IPO and you dump it with a big gain early and he slaps your wrists and won't offer again, fine...make the best of it though!

I doubt this is threadworthy so I'm posting it here, since it's somewhat related. Am I missing something here?

US citizen who was born and raised in another country renounces his US citizenship to avoid paying taxes (maybe that's not the reason... whatever), he's demonized in the press and Congress immediately gets involved.

Corporations that were born and raised in the US become multi-nationals and (to varying degrees) do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes. Press says virtually nothing, Congress eventually gets slightly involved and does nothing. Articles about "evil" citizen make no mention of corporations doing the same thing for much bigger stakes.

Is this simply proof that our media/politicians are owned by our "corporate overlords," or is there a legit argument against saverin and/or for the businesses that do the same exact thing?

No, no. You're pretty much dead on.

Funny, on a sports radio show this week they were talking about all the better possible things to do with the money than give it to the US gov't, which is about the worst place for money to end up and lit on fire constantly.

Really depends on what news/ radio outlet you are hearing it from, the ones with big corporate/ political ties will freak out and call him un-American, the ones with real people without a hidden agenda will call it like they see it (which is also biased, but at least it is more honestly biased).

meh, the media I have seen (bloomberg, cnbc, fox business, etc.) dont seem to care about the citizenship thing aside from a single rant by one cnbc anchor. Most of them think its a good business decision. Also, he did pay capital gains taxes when he renounced his citizenship which was when FB had a $50B valuation. He just isnt paying the additional taxes now.