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May 2012, week number 21….what happened..#Liverpool #Chelsea #success #cpi #remote #gocompare #Facebook #banks #greece #renesas
Monday 21st
It’s a funny old game. After Saturday night’s victory against Bayern Munich, Roberto di Matteo is still not sure whether he will be named Chelsea manager. Just in case anyone missed it, under his caretaker managership Chelsea have won The Champions League final and the domestic FA Cup. Somewhat odd also, that Liverpool recently sacked their manager Kenny Dalglish, after he led them to a Carling Cup victory, an FA Cup final, ironically against Chelsea and a 8th place finish in The Premier League. So between them, di Matteo and Dalglish have won 3 cups and apparently they are both unemployed! High expectations indeed from the owners
Kenny Dalglish Soccer Manager (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
or just plain stupid?
Tuesday 22nd
UK CPI has fallen from 3.5 to 3.0% in April. We are reliably informed that RPI is down too. For anyone who doesn’t know these two measures calculate inflation. Loosely this tells you whether you’ve got more spare cash at the end of the month. I can reliably inform the Office for National Statistics that both of these figures are meaningless and unrepresentative of REAL inflation, which is how much everyday spending on essential goods has increased. As Mark Twain wrote, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Wednesday 23rd
Eugene Polley, the man who invented the “remote control” died aged 96. The “remote” was originally invented to turn off the TV during long annoying commercials. Not much has changed then!
Thursday 24th
Facebook shares closed last night at $32, 15% lower that the recent IPO price. Pending lawsuits are alleging that price sensitive information was withheld by Zuckerberg, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. The only surprise is that everyone’s surprised!
facebook (Photo credit: sitmonkeysupreme)
Friday 25th
Greece in still in the Euro, yawn. Renesas, the loss making Japanese microchip maker, is reportedly planning to raise 100B Yen (about $1.3bn) and cut 10,000 jobs.
Wow, 10,000 jobs…$1.3bn…….gulp
Related articles
- Chelsea to Axe Roberto Di Matteo This Week: Abramovich Believes Italian Was ‘Lucky’ to Win Champions League Title (caughtoffside.com)
- Facebook, Bing & Polley (sethfaustine.wordpress.com)
The great Facebook debacle Part 2 #mugs #muppets
“Ha ha ha, look at all those muppets in the street with their Facebook stock. I’m still short at $42 and $38…… put in a bid to buy my short back at $32.
I’ll see you in the “Gilt” later, get the “Dom” on ice!”
So, it turns out, that in the biggest technology IPO in history, investors in the street, were given the opportunity to participate in 25% of the shares offered.
Next up, it turns out that Goldman are selling up to $1.09bn of stock in the IPO. This was stock it already owned.
RING RING RING ALARM BELL!!!!
It later transpires, that a Morgan Stanley analyst told a privileged few, that it was cutting revenue estimates, during the IPO roadshow.
So what’s changed since the demise of Lehmans and the financial crisis of the last few years. Not much by the look of things. Seems that the rich are getting richer, the middle classes are still a great target and the poor, well nobody gives a damn about them anyway!
Not a great advert for Wall Street.
Common sense, don’t partake in an IPO without it!
Related articles
- Muppet Show (theburningplatform.com)
- Facebook, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs All Sued Over IPO Debacle (nymag.com)
- Facebook IPO: From “In Trouble” to Court (the2012scenario.com)
- After Facebook IPO debacle, finger-pointing begins (rhodesholdings.wordpress.com)
- Well Done, Muppets! Great Job Not Getting Sucked In By The Facebook Hype… (businessinsider.com)
The great Facebook debacle Part 1 #mugs #muppets
Image via CrunchBase
Facebook IPO Frenzy Costs Main Street More Than $600 Million (1)
2012-05-24 07:38:42.842 GMT
(Updates with German stock trading in 12th paragraph.)
By Danielle Kucera and Douglas MacMillan
May 24 (Bloomberg) — Ryan Cefalu, who lives with his wife
and two kids in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saw in Facebook Inc.’s
much-anticipated initial public offering a chance to buffer his
retirement fund. His expectations fizzled along with the stock
within the first minutes of trading.
“It’s disheartening to know that things get over-hyped,”
Cefalu, a 34-year-old data-systems manager who spent about
$4,000 on the stock, said in an interview. “That’s about a 12th
of my annual income — so a month’s salary. I’m trying to do an
on-my-own retirement kind of thing.”
Facebook, a site used by 901 million people worldwide,
allocated more than 25 percent of shares to retail investors,
said two people familiar with the offering who asked not to be
identified because the process was confidential. That means the
value of stock bought by that group for $38 in the IPO has
dropped by at least $630 million in total, based on the closing
price of $32 yesterday and assuming investors held onto the
stock.
While asset managers and hedge funds got to buy the stock
in private trading years before the IPO and investment banks
made money in the offering, small-time investors had to wait
until last week’s IPO for a piece of the action. The outcome:
After Facebook and its underwriters misjudged demand in pricing
the IPO and glitches on the Nasdaq hampered trading on the first
day, the world’s largest social-network website lost 18 percent
in three days. The stock is still about 16 percent under its $38
IPO price after paring some losses yesterday.
‘Should I Bail?’
Facebook, the biggest technology IPO in history, turned
into a quagmire of blame. Buyers of the stock sued the company,
Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. and the underwriters, claiming they were
misled. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the
brokerage industry’s watchdog both said they may review the
offering, and the scrutiny prompted Morgan Stanley, the lead
underwriter, to defend its handling of the IPO in a statement.
“I thought it would be fun to get in on the initial
frenzy,” said Linda Lantz, an online marketer in Granite Bay,
California, who bought 100 shares. “Now it makes me think ‘Oh
god, should I bail or is it going to come back?’”
For Cefalu, whose children are age 12 and 1, the first-day
glitches meant more than a bad day of trading: they made him buy
twice as many shares as he intended after an order he canceled
went through hours later, he said. With shares of Zynga Inc.
slumping along with Facebook, he estimates he lost a combined
$2,250 as a result of the Facebook debut debacle.
Technical Problems
Michael McClafferty, a freshman finance major at Michigan
State University, saw his “first big investment” turn into a
$3,000 loss when he sold the shares at $35.
“I didn’t want to lose more,” McClafferty said. “I
didn’t know what to do.”
The 19 year-old student estimates he spent $8,000 more than
he wanted to while repeating orders that wouldn’t go through on
the first day, and failing to cancel them because of the
technical problems.
“I didn’t know what happened,” he said. “Then I was
like, ‘they should be able to do something about it.’ They
messed up pretty big from what I see, and it hurt more people
than just me.”
The stock rose 3.2 percent to $32 at 4 p.m. yesterday in
New York. In German trading today, it climbed 1.1 percent to the
equivalent of $32.08 as of 9:34 a.m.
Retail Investors
On its debut, the Menlo Park, California-based website
jumped to $45 at the start of trading, which was delayed 30
minutes, before ending the day up 0.6 percent at $38.23. It
paled in contrast with Google Inc.’s 18 percent jump in its 2004
initial public offering, Visa Inc.’s 28 percent gain in 2008 and
LinkedIn Corp.’s 109 percent surge last May.
“The reaction of the retail investor is ‘Wow, what a
flop,’” Jay Pestrichelli, co-founder of the Omaha, Nebraska-
based investment adviser Zega Financial, said in an interview.
Larry Yu, a spokesman for Facebook, declined to comment.
Facebook increased the number of shares sold and the price
range days before the IPO, raising $16 billion and valuing the
company at $104.2 billion.
Pat Brogan, a Yahoo! Inc. manager who trades on sites run
by E*Trade Financial Corp. and Fidelity Brokerage in her spare
time, called the experience of buying Facebook stock the
“biggest fiasco” in her 30 years of day trading.
“They flooded the market with so many shares,” Brogan
said. “I’m actually going to dump them if they get back to
$38.”
Big Gamble
Demand from retail buyers was higher than normal for
Facebook, with personal investment website Sigfig.com seeing 10
times more orders than it had for other recent technology IPOs,
said Terry Banet, chief investment officer for the site.
“Facebook wanted to get more retail involvement and they
succeeded,” Banet said.
Some investors managed to take advantage of the initial
gain. James DiMaggio, a 29-year-old product line sales manager
at Ametek Inc. in Morton, Pennsylvania, said he bought 200
shares at $38, sold half for $40.98 and made about $280.
“The other half is now tanking,” said DiMaggio, who
estimates his losses so far at $320. “It was really exciting in
the beginning. I don’t gamble, and this is obviously a gamble.”
Long-Term Potential
In the wake of the stock’s losses this week, small-time
investors took to the Web to express their agitation on sites
including Twitter Inc. and online investing community StockTwits
Inc.
“There’s a lot of questioning about the IPO process in
general and a sentiment that the real investor is getting taken
by the larger Wall Street,” said Phil Pearlman, executive
editor of StockTwits.
Some investors still see potential in the long term. At
Sigfig, 7 percent of users who bought Facebook on May 18 sold it
the same day, below the 15 percent to 31 percent first-day
flipping of stock that has been more typical of recent
technology IPOs, according to Banet.
“Short term fluctuations don’t bother me,” said Charles
Landry of Sacramento, California, who bought 1,000 shares on May
18. “Facebook has the potential to be, in the long term, one of
the iconic companies in Silicon Valley, a la Google, a la
Apple.”
Renee Morrison, who runs accounting at Empyrion Wealth
Management in Roseville, California, had never bought a stock in
her life before investing in Facebook last week. She too plans
to wait it out, she said.
“I have been very well educated and prepared that it’s
kind of like gambling, there’s no guarantee,” Morrison said.
For Related News and Information:
Facebook stories: FB US <EQUITY> CN <GO>
Internet industry research: BI INET
IPO Data: IPO <GO>
Top technology news: TTOP
–With assistance from Ari Levy in San Francisco and Sarah Frier
and Bob Van Voris in New York. Editors: Cecile Daurat, Elizabeth
Wollman
To contact the reporters on this story:
Danielle Kucera in San Francisco at +1-415-617-7163 or
dkucera6@bloomberg.net;
Douglas MacMillan in San Francisco at +1-415-617-7134 or
dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tom Giles at +1-415-617-7223 or
tgiles5@bloomberg.net
Related articles
- Facebook stock climbs, but company faces lawsuits (newsok.com)
- Wall Street Made A Fortune Off The Facebook IPO (forbes.com)
- Facebook’s dream IPO is starting to look like a nightmare (marketday.msnbc.msn.com)
- Facebook, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs All Sued Over IPO Debacle (nymag.com)
Week 20 May 2012, what happened? #greece #eurocrisis #euromillions #Landsecurities #donnasummer #G8 #shit
Main building of the bank of Greece. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Monday 14th Greece, the leader of far-left Syriza party, refuses to enter coalition talks, effectively signing the exit of Greece from the Eurozone. To be honest it’s been on the cards for a long time and the sooner it’s over and done with the better.
Tuesday 15th The euromillions jackpot rolls over for a 5th time. Buy your ticket on Friday to have a chance to win Euro 64m but be warned, there will be stiff competition from Greece.
Wednesday 16th According to property group Land Securities, many locations “may never recover” from current struggles.
Well better late than never!
Thursday 17th May Sadly, disco diva Donna Summer passed away. I spent a lot of my youth “givin’ it my all on the dance floor” to her tunes…………….Hot stuff 
Also worth mentioning that Eduardo Saverin, seems to have turned his back on the land of opportunity. Hasn’t gone down very well at all!
Friday 17th With Greece in chaos and the Spanish banking system on the verge of collapse, President Obama will meet with European leaders at the G8 summit, this weekend in Camp David. On the agenda no doubt will be, “Bloody hell, what now?”
How about nationalize the Spanish banking system completely? Alternatively, introduce a Worldwide short selling ban. Nothing like a bit of market manipulation!
Oh and by the way, Hewlett-Packard are considering cutting 25,000 jobs. Not good.
Related articles
- Time for Spain to take 100% of Bankia and take it off the stock market #badbank #eurocrisis #euro #spain #greece (simplesimon8.wordpress.com)
- Hot Stuff (wiretotheear.com)
- CBI blame Greece for lack of new investments (itv.com)
- Eurocrisis, 1998 (newstatesman.com)
I can’t seem to find Eduardo Saverin on FB…where does he live now? #FB #taxes #USA #home #Brazil #bloomberg
Seal of the United States Internal Revenue Service. The design is the same as the Treasury seal with an IRS inscription. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
May 17 (Bloomberg) — Facebook’s initial public offering
reminds us of a story.
Once upon a time, there was a young man who fled his
homeland (Brazil) because his life was in danger (kidnappers).
Like so many before him, he came to the United States. There, in
the safety of the freest, most dynamic country on earth, he got
a superb education (Harvard), the opportunity to exercise his
entrepreneurial zeal (Facebook) — and the protections of the
U.S. legal system to safeguard the fruits of his labor.
That man is Eduardo Saverin, age 30, co-founder of Facebook
and someone who stands to be worth about $2.89 billion when the
company’s shares are loosed on the world this week. He’s also
someone who, coincidentally, has renounced his U.S. citizenship
in exchange for residency in Singapore.
Singapore has much to commend it. Superb food. Clean
streets. Lush plant life. It also has very favorable rates of
taxation on capital gains — zero percent versus 15 percent in
the U.S.
It seems fair to ask, then, if Saverin switched national
allegiances to avoid U.S. taxes. He says he filed his papers to
give up citizenship in January 2011 and that the move “had
nothing to do with taxes.” And we take him at his word. But the
timing of the news — the IRS released his name April 30 as part
of its quarterly publication of “Individuals Who Have Chosen to
Expatriate” — has raised the issue, and the circumstantial math
is compelling: Saverin’s move could save him $67 million in
federal taxes, according to Bloomberg.
One can believe, as we do, in free markets, open borders,
and the need for goods and capital, human and otherwise, to flow
across them with ease, and still feel mildly unsettled by
Saverin’s decision — just as we find it discomfiting when U.S.
corporations contort themselves to seek out overseas tax havens.
A debt is owed to the country you call home, whether you
were born here or arrived under duress. Arguably, that debt is
deepened if the freedoms your country afforded you helped create
the conditions for your success.
Whatever you want to say about U.S. tax rates — and we
have argued for reform and a flattening and simplifying of rates
– they are “our” tax rates, the ones our balky democracy has
put in place. And whatever you want to say about Mark
Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, he made the choice to pay his taxes
in California — his golden, struggling, adopted state, whose
coffers he is sure to enrich.
As for Saverin, well, it would have been nice if he’d made
a similar choice. Since he didn’t, perhaps the best we can wish
for him now is a longer than normal wait at U.S. customs.
Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View.
