Facebook IPO Mess Turning Into A Legal & Financial Circus As Morgan Stanley Agrees To Adjust Prices On Trades
from the wow dept
On Friday, after the Facebook IPO, we wrote a response to those who were complaining about the lack of a first day stock "pop." While the press seems to love those first day pop stories, we've argued for well over a decade that such things are merely signs of a stock being underpriced by Wall Street, causing the company to leave money on the table that it should have received in exchange for its shares. As more details come out about the Facebook IPO, however, it looks like there were a bunch of other issues with the offering, and a big and lengthy legal mess is about to ensue. However, one thing I'll stand by is the claim that the lack of a pop is a good sign, not a bad sign. In this case, though, it may actually have been part of the banks' attempts to cover up the fact that they did the opposite of what they normally did: rather than underprice the deal, it sure looks like they overpriced it... and perhaps tried to cover up that information.There was lots of talk about how the underwriters were propping up the price on Friday, suggesting weak demand for the stock at the IPO price (or above), and without that support this week, the stock has dropped. But there were significant other issues behind that, which came out in the past few days, including the somewhat astounding claim that the underwiters all learned that Facebook's Q2 was looking worse than had been previously communicated, leading the underwriters to all drop their estimates in unison... but supposedly only informed a few large institutional buyers. Yikes. It's somewhat insane that anyone thought they'd get away with that, and, of course, lawsuits have been filed and there are a bunch of government investigations kicking off, including from the Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee and the SEC. I'm not at all confident that any of those will do a decent job of any of this... but it's going to be tied up for a long, long time.
Separate from all of this were the technical "glitches" that caused the IPO to happen later than expected... along with claims that either trades weren't being completed or the prices were higher than expected. On that front, Morgan Stanley has now admitted that it is going to comb through pretty much all of the trades and will make pricing adjustments... which is going to be pretty costly.
Felix Salmon's recap suggests that absolutely everyone comes out of this looking bad. It's just that kind of debacle. I do agree (somewhat) with Matthew Yglesias that blaming Mark Zuckerberg for not playing the Wall Street game is a little unfair, since Zuckerberg and Facebook actually made out nicely in the deal, apparently getting more cash for the equity they sold than what the market was valuing the company at. From a corporate standpoint, that seems like a good deal. Sell high, and all that.
You could make the claim that that's a short-term view and in the long term, the fact that the IPO was so botched, and that Facebook may have walked away with quite a deal for the shares it did sell, may come back to haunt the company in other ways -- in particular when it next decides to tap the capital markets. However, Wall Street can be quite forgiving if you can make it lots and lots of money, and while it's certainly going to be a lot more careful in taking Facebook at its word going forward, a little skepticism and extra scrutiny on Wall Street isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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Filed Under: house financial services committee, ipo, market price, sec, senate banking committee
Companies: facebook
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I'd like to agree with you, but I don't. Consider the best and worst case scenarios:
Best case: they get away with it and make a BIG pile of money.
Worst case: investigations and lawsuits take years to reach conclusions. They can be stonewalled by skilled corporate attorneys (and will be, no doubt). Expendable low-level employees can be set up to take the fall, since they were "operating recklessly without management approval". Statements can be issued declaring "we take this matter seriously". Favors can be called in from ex-brokerage employees at all levels of government. Blame can be shifted. "Mistakes were made" can be made plausible. Plenty of time remains to bail via golden parachute and be somewhere else when that sternly-worded letter finally shows up in 2017. Nobody will go to prison. Nobody will give up any profits. If the companies are fined, that'll be covered by a taxpayer-funded bailout.
So...I don't think they're insane at all. I don't think they care whether they get away with it, because even if they don't...they will.
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The dynamics of so called markets do not follow the rules of reason by any stretch of imagination - what appears to you as a good thing may be (and most often is) the exact opposite by "market logic" and vice versa - this is actually true for economics in general.
Take for example a case when you'd wave a magic wand and cure all disease at once - while we can all agree this would be a good thing I guess, it would be interpreted as a total disaster in market terms. A huge chunk of US GDP consists of "healthcare" industry so GDP would crash overnight, companies would fail, stocks plummet, investment portfolios tank - it would cause an all out recession/depression. This is clearly total polar opposite of the actual situation which would be great by common sense and proper logic.
The same goes for ending war (what would the "defense" contractors do? You do not want their children to starve by ending the wars, do you?)
It's upside-down, that's why what makes perfect sense to you like the FB IPO trading at the price it was offered instead of a "pop" is actually a bad thing when "market logic" comes into play - so a fair warning:
DO NOT USE COMMON SENSE AND LOGIC where markets are concerned - you'll get burned badly, taht is no place for reason.
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The stock market is rigged
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Re: The stock market is rigged
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better if I put in the link...
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This all seems to boil down to nothing more than a single trading day of a particular stock. Why should that be enough to trigger any sort of investigation. Compared to other IPOs in recent history, this one was positively benign. The swings in the stock price were negligible.
It seems like people are upset that they couldn't make a quick buck and have gaurantees on top of that.
Also, the allegedly secret "revised revenue estimates" reflect common knowledge among the tech community.
The real "crime" here seems to be the lack of any sort of "bubble".
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Also, trending on google "bank run"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/google-shows-why-status-quo-powers-be-should-be-scared-very-sc ared
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I wanted to short it
I wanted to find a way to short it, but I didn't have any way to borrow the shares. :-/
On top of that, there are apparently A LOT more shares available to come on the market soon. The owners are currently contractually barred from selling, but a massive increase in supply probably won't make the value per share go up.
Maybe in 6 months or a year it will be possible for the market to work out a fair value.
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Google Plus ... Its Facebook, just not evil.
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- addresses of people who've never been to the site
- addresses that don't exist
- addresses that NEVER existed
- addresses designed as spamtraps
A brief (and cluttered, sorry) introduction to this may be had by going to https://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/topics and searching for "linkedin". Or you could just search the web for "linkedin spam", because this is a fairly well-known problem, and has been for years.
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I'm gonna dig into this.
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A downward moving number that is only mitigated by underwriters, is both lack of a pop and a bad sign.
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Think of this whole Stock Market thing and you really get to see just how worthless and greedy that whole Industry is.As I watched the beginning all I could think of was Lemmings.
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Let's call it "Prop and Drop"
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What it means
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