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SEC Calls For Review of Facebook IPO
beaverdownunder writes "After losing another 8.9% of its IPO value in its third day of trading, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro has called for a review of the circumstances surrounding Facebook's IPO on the NASDAQ late last week. Unable to sell Facebook short, investors have instead taken to short-selling funds that owned pre-IPO shares as revelations come out that the underwriters involved revised their Facebook profit forecasts downward in the days before the offering without similarly revising the opening share price. Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters Starmine has come out with a post-party Facebook estimate of a meager 10.8 per cent annual growth rate, valuing the stock at a paltry $US9.59 a share, a 72 per cent discount on its IPO price, signaling that the battered stock may not have found the bottom yet."
I'm sick and tired of these banks screwing over the little guy.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these companies truly represent the epitome of corporate greed and corruption in america.
That said, a stock is like anything else. people will pay what they think it is worth. If they don't think it is worth it, they should not pay!
I could bid $100/share for FB right now and I would find lots of people willing to sell it to me at that price. If I feel it is worth that much, I shouldn't complain later when I find out someone would have sold it to me for only $10/share.
It's a lot like salary. If I accept an offer to work for $100K/year, I do so believing that is a fair value for what I offer, and I should feel good about it. If I later find out that my neighbor in the next cube offer, who has the same qualifications and start date that I do, managed to negotiate for $200K/year, I shouldn't complain. I'm still getting what I agreed to, and what I agreed was a fair price.
Bottom line - lots of people are just bitching because they didn't get rich quick, for doing nothing, like they thought they would. Too bad for them.
Of course he did. That was the whole point of this IPO: they wanted to cash out before it burst. The money to be made out of it was already made by the original owners, at expense of the investors. There was not a single reason to believe FB was priced fairly and not overvalued, and no clear indication on how FB could make enough money in the future to justify a 100B valuation. After the market experiences in the last 15 years, I cannot believe how many bought into the hype of this.
You don't have to pay any income tax at all - there are plenty of places that don't charge it. Go live on the Cayman islands and make your fortune there - I don't think they have any income tax or capital gains tax, so you can keep 100% of your money!
Of course it's a bit more difficult to make your money without an educated workforce, or lots of infrastructure, or developed labour and financial laws, or trade connections, or any of the other things that government provides for business. But who needs any of that? People who make money make it entirely through their own effort and talent and don't owe one iota of a debt to the government.
On the other hand if you want to make use of the advantages that government spending provides in order to make your fortune it behoves you to pay the tax that finances that spending.