The Facebook IPO: wasn't this a classic case of a speculative bubble designed

[hedgehog]

to generate profits for the few who manged to get in low and sell out high before the bubble popped?

[Aerows]

1. Yes

Anyone with a grain of sense stayed away from that turkey. It was entirely predictable what was going to happen.

[dkf]

2. No it was a pure fiasco. Who wants to IPO through Morgan Stanley now?

[Kolesar]

4. Didn't Morgan Stanley buy a huge amount of FB when the price was tanking?

I don't know if they were left holding the bag as prices fell or if Morgan Stanley had a brief reprieve when the price went up.

{_} capitialism as normal
{X} fiasco

[tularetom]

3. Sure it was - the facebook insiders who were holding tons of options

successfully managed to finagle the underwriters of the IPO to set the initial price high enough so that they could dump their shares before the share price took a dive. A massive sell off would of course immediately depress the price and that is certainly what happened.

I'd be interested in finding out how many shares were sold by Zuckerberg and other FB mucky mucks on the first day of trading when the shares were going for $38.

[former9thward]

5. No it wasn't.

Zuckerberg said in the IPO filing that he was going to sell 5% of his shares to pay taxes. So there was no conspiracy or secret. It was known to the market well before FB started trading. Any other insider selling also put that in the IPO filing papers. It was known to anyone who wanted to buy the shares.

You are aware, aren't you, that Zuckerberg did not want to have an IPO. He wanted to stay private. SEC regulations required certain information to be reported once they passed 500 private shareholders. Zuckerberg refused to take on additional investors so they would stay under 500 but others shareholders were doing private selling so they passed the magic 500 mark. They were forced to take it public at that point.