Monday, August 13, 2012

Aug. 16: Another Facebook D-Day.

Facebook's investors, including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Accel, can begin selling shares in Facebook on Aug. 16 for the first time since the social networking site's inital public offering. It will be interesting to see how much and whether investors will let go of their stock, given that the stock has dropped 43 percent since its listing.

Now, fewer than 500 million shares are available to trading- but over the next nine months, about 1.9 billion shares might be unleashed on the public market, according to this Bloomberg article. The story highlights the dilemma facing these big invetors: sell now and cut losses (or really, fewer profits) or sit and watch the stock drop further.

Facebook's IPO has been the worst among all IPO's on record -- a startling contrast to the experience of Google Inc., whose shares more than doubled by the end of 2004, the year the company sold shares to the public.

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