That's much different from a subscription.

I locked up 500 shares at IPO price. Looked through the offering materials some on my flight to Vegas today, one thing that jumped out at me was the fact that they have 526m DAILY ACTIVE USERS. That is pretty insane and the earnings and revenue growth are staggering too. That said I feel like psychological factors are going to be majorly at play in the first few weeks it's floated. I don't generally think I have an edge in that kind of insight but holding for 3-4 days then selling just seems massively +EV. Debating between that (and subsequently buying dips) and just holding longterm, thoughts?

If the Facebook IPO is successful and trading on the shares begin friday the 18th, the first trading day for Facebook options will be Tuesday the 29th (the 28th would actually be the first day the options would be eligible, but that’s Memorial Day).

The options pricing will pretty much determine whether or not your strategy makes sense. Essentially you are a net buyer of volatility (vega), depending on the options pricing you can decide if the options trade at a discount to your expected move.

You might want to look into straddles.

In all fairness, it is going to be hard to make a prediction based on vol, since there is no real dataset. Other market participants and market makers will probably jack up iv and vol -> thus adding premium to the options.

Id like to be able to meet that $250K min but a lemon is a lemon

Facebook will go up a bit at first, then go down ... at some point people will get angry and start posting on facebook about it, it will continue to go down.. people will quit facebook / post facebooks sucks messages etc, nothing can be done about this.. it will continue to go down and lose users who feel like they got screwed over by facebook. Mark Suckerberg sells out, etc.

Listening to any commentary about the IPO makes me sick, all of these guys have already bought / own facebook shares.. now they are trying to suck regular people in to drive up the price, so they can sell at the peak.

Everything in the market looks like such **** right now. People are looking for anything to get excited about, and FB is going to capture a lot of that irrational exuberance.

Here's a good summary of the Facebook situation by a SV guy I tend to respect.

http://cdixon.org/2012/05/15/facebooks-business-model/

Startups usually succeed because of a single major product or business innovation. Google is unusual in that they succeeded because of two major innovations: their core search product, and their keyword advertising business model. Back in 2000, when Google was wildly popular but generating no revenue, the conventional wisdom was that their business model was uncertain. Then Overture invented keyword advertising and Google adopted the same model. This turned out to be both wildly profitable and also, remarkably, created a better experience for both advertisers and users.

Facebook relies on an old internet business model: display ads. Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not very efficient at producing revenues. Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have 2x the pageviews. Some estimates put Google’s search revenues per pageviews at 100-200x Facebook’s.

The good news for Facebook is there is a lot of room to target ads more effectively and put ads in more places. The bad news is that, if there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it’s that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.

The key question when trying to value Facebook’s stock is: can they find another business model that generates significantly more revenue per user without hurting the user experience? (And can they do that in an increasingly mobile world where display ads have been even less effective.) Perhaps that business model is sponsored feed entries, as Facebook seems to be hoping (along with Twitter and perhaps Tumblr). The jury is still out on that model. Personally, I have trouble seeing how insertions into the feeds aren’t just more prominent display ads. You still have to stoke demand and convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. A more likely outcome is that Facebook uses their assets – a vast number of extremely engaged users, it’s social graph, Facebook Connect – to monetize through another business model. If they do that, the company is probably worth a lot more than the expected $100B IPO valuation. If they don’t, it’s probably worth a lot less.

FaceBook's market cap briefly passed $100 trillion /50000$ per share in a reverse flash crash.

Bleh. Firing in 50k (15 of my own, 35 for my best friend) in 35 minutes. Going to try to catch some sort of lull and hope it runs up. The first minute or two might be berserk with volatility, or shoot straight up. Hopefully it goes up and then goes straight down so I get some sort of entry point, but I doubt that'll happen.

Anyway, good luck to everyone making money on it no matter what side you're on.

FB will be an HFT killzone...

quoting on FB will start at 10:45 am

FB indicated to open at $35 share on 19 mil shares

Where does it say that? I thought it was 38?

...$45 now

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/facebo...cative-open-45