Forbes: Facebook Fed The 'Ignorant' Masses An IPO Lite

Facebook Fed The 'Ignorant' Masses An IPO Lite


The Facebook IPO is an excellent reminder of the role that amnesia plays in the stock market.

It’s said that markets are efficient, and I guess they are in a narrow sense, in that stocks tend to incorporate all of the publicly available information about them. But the same principle certainly doesn’t apply to the way market participants interact with one another. So we have the spectacle of JPMorgan Chase repeating the mistakes of 2008 and losing $3 billion (and counting). For the rest of us, we have the Facebook IPO, in which an entire body of knowledge and memory of the IPO process was buried down the memory hole, totally forgotten.

How did a company best known for wasting people’s time (when it’s not violating their privacy) become the IPO stinker of our times? Because people forget that it’s been proven time and again that the only proven winners in IPOs are the issuers, insiders and underwriters, with favored clients like hedge funds and institutional investors the only ones able to benefit consistently from IPOs that perform well out of the starting gate.

In this case, the issuer made out like a bandit. Facebook reaped $16 billion that will allow it to compete with the Goliaths of the industry. Facebook management, meanwhile, has borrowed from the techniques of shoddy used-car salesmen everywhere by failing to give full value for all that money. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thestreet/2012/05/30/facebook-fed-the-ignorant-masses-an-ipo-lite/