Slashdot Mirror
Massive LinkedIn IPO Raises Dotcom Bubble Concerns
The Installer writes with news of yesterday's stock offering from LinkedIn, which shocked investors by closing at more than double the initial price. "Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper. The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares." That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue, leading to speculation that this is either evidence of the second dotcom bubble (a possibility we discussed in February) or a "watershed moment for social media." Many experts are questioning the value of LinkedIn, while others are claiming intentional market manipulation.
I think that is just every resume
Three years ago, I used to recieve endless "Come Join Us on LinkedIn" e-mails to several e-mail accounts. Because at some point an old boss had somehow gave LinkedIn access to his Hotmail or Outlook book or something and created a place holder for me with my first and last name (and also my e-mail address) because my boss had that and only that information in his address book for me. Creeped me right the %*#@ out.
It wasn't hard to get the e-mails to stop but I'd wager that shell of a profile is out there floating around linking my old coworkers in a web -- for any of them that added that profile or had one of the e-mail addresses in their book. At the time, no one seemed to find this alarming but me so whatever. And now Facebook and a lot of sites will harvest your address book for you from Hotmail or whatever and then it will aggressively market that person to come to said social networking site on your behalf. Each site wants to boast fifty billion users (or some factor higher than living human beings), right?
But LinkedIn is really outpacing those sites: an outlook plugin/hijacker, drupal integration, actually a plugin for virtually anything and of course APIs to put it in your site.
So I was wondering what had gone wrong when I heard about its IPO the other day. After all, it's one of the creepiest spammiest social networking sites I've encountered. But that's just it, its methods are effective and so it is rewarded. If privacy abuser Facebook is "worth" the yearly GDP of a small nation, surely a website implementing the same APIs and plugins while experimenting with creepin' it up a notch is going to drive investors crazy. I think it's more a sign of overvaluation of a privacy abuse bubble--one I've been hoping to see pop for quite sometime now.
My work here is dung.
Maybe 5 years ago, but since then it's become a useless collection of unemployed strangers giving referrals to other unemployed strangers, and a collection of spam posters.
Almost nobody keeps their profile up to date, because the vast majority of its "users" don't even bother to use it any more.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
LinkedIn may have a "valuable user base" but does it have an active one? How much time do people spend on LinkedIn? I have a LinkedIn account and I log in maybe once every few months to accept invitations. It's a resume with references attached. It's invaluable when you're searching for jobs, but it's not a true social site.
My point is that yes, you could use the information you have for me to direct highly effective advertisements at me - but only when I'm logged in.
Facebook, people are logged in every waking second it seems like. It's their email, their IM, their message board - it's their life, not just their resume.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
"He's on LinkedIn, Lemon. He might as well be dead." -Jack Donaghy
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it.
The thing is, as bad as bubbles are for the system, for each individual caught up in them in modern times they are very much a winning proposition, for a bunch of reasons:
1. For almost all of them, there is a greater fool out there. For instance, on the bad subprime mortgage market, Goldman Sachs made darn sure that when it hit the fan that all of it was propelled in the direction of AIG.
2. If a bubble breaks, you're likely to get bailed out by Uncle Sam if you're big enough and stupid enough, so you really have nothing to worry about.
3. Even if your company has gone under, thanks to limited liability the person making the decision to buy bubble assets knows they won't be penalized too much by the loss.
4. Thanks to most corporate cultures in big Wall St firms, if you ever play it on the safe side and react to a bubble by staying out of it, you'll be penalized a great deal for performing below the market during the bubble.
So game theory gives our fund manager 2 options with some theoretical payoffs:
1. Play it safe: +10, or
2. Buy into the bubble: 90% chance of +100 / 10% chance of +0.
Any rational fund manager picks option 2.
I am officially gone from
It should be obvious that the "public" stock markets are a crooked casino run by the investment banks. They own the cops; all the alphabet agencies that claim to "regulate" trading activity. They own all the politicians, who make the laws that determine whether illicit activity is permitted. They even own the Supreme Court, who says a batch of numbers controlled by an oligarchy is a human being in the eyes of the law and the courts. If you're a single person who raises a flag, the SEC will freeze your assets and try to haul you into court. If you're big enough to be a Madoff, then you get to run your scam until you piss off the wrong people. If you're Goldman Sachs, you're untouchable.
The "public" stock market is meaningless. Its not even where all the "big" action is happening. All the real money making is in the derivatives floor. And most of that are private transactions between banks. That doesn't even include the shadow stock market located outside of NY. That's the place where thousands of transactions are being made at hundredths of a second. What is the economic utility in making trading decisions faster than 1 second, before a human being can even initiate a buy/sell decision? And finally, the real money is made on the commodities floor, where collusion between the oil companies, investment banks, and high end speculators can drive up the price of consumer oil by $1/gal. in the middle of an oil GLUT.
Who gives a damn about Linkedin getting an overvalued IPO? The "public" stock market is meaningless compared the trading activity happening outside of the exchanges. The Facebook IPO didn't even happen on the trading floor! It was a "private" sale to avoid gov't regulators. The NYSE significance is trivial to the global economy. That's why the US gov't is going to allow it to be bought by foreign owners. You can pore through company statements, do your due diligence, read the Wall Street Journal, it doesn't matter. What you and the peons think a company's valuation and quality of its leadership is irrelevant. It'll get wiped down to peanuts by the single flick of an unreported derivatives trade.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon