Keller @ Large: Facebook Flop A Warning For Gamblers?
BOSTON (CBS) - Whoops, I was out walking the dog when the Facebook IPO hit the stock market, and I just don't play the market much anyway, so I missed out on all the fun and excitement of the stock going public.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
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And just between you and me, I'm secretly glad.
After two days on the market, Facebook stock is trading well below it's initial asking price, exactly the opposite of how a successful IPO usually performs.
Maybe it'll bounce back today, but somehow I doubt it.
Even at $34 a share, four dollars below the opening price, the price is far beyond their projected earnings over the next year, according to theWall Street Journal, which notes "a Facebook share is more than four times as expensive as a share of Google."
After all the glittery media hype about Facebook ruling the world and sitting on the Fort Knox of social and marketing data, it turns out actual buyers weren't so starry-eyed.
Said one expert: "What we're seeing here is the market is converging back to reality."
Reality. What a concept.
It seems there have been two disconnected realities at work here for the last few years.
There's the unreal reality of brokers and investors who thought it was realistic to expect a never-ending gravy train of expanding real-estate values and profits off synthetic collateralized debt obligations.
And there's the grim reality of the rest of us, forced to temper our expectations and shun risk by the need to survive amid the mess the first group created.
Maybe the Facebook flop has exposed how far that caution has spread.
Lucky thing our new Massachusetts casinos aren't opening in the middle of all this.
Gambling revenues aren't immune to economic ebb and flow; just ask the tribes in Connecticut or Trump and the others in Atlantic City.
But let's be optimistic.
Maybe three years from now we'll look back and say Facebook was a great buy, and so were casinos.
Or maybe we'll find ourselves converging back to reality.
You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.
