FT Alphaville " 18/05/2012 (Before-FB) Is life as we know it gonna change after 11am New York time on Friday? Will Mark Zuckerberg be crowned emperor of the dweebs (just as Napoleon was crowned emperor of the French exactly 208 years ago today) or will he fall flat on his puli sheepdog? While we await for that all-important first trade, here's a round up of some of the expectations out there and who's saying what. On the trading technicalities... Nanex's Eric Scott Hunsader will be keeping an eye out for any oddities in how the stock trades and in the interim provides this little reminder of what happened to the Linkedin IPO-ed as guidance of what to expect. He warns: beware of wide off-market quotes... If a system glitch caused a trade to incorrectly route to one of the wide quotes, it would have halted the stock, or worse. Especially important if it's going to entice retail investors back into the market. But is it a bubble? Will Facebook's IPO be the marker of the latest top for technology IPOs? Compare and contrast with the tech IPOs of yesteryear with this useful interactive guide from the New York Times. There's a lot of bubble talk out there, that's for sure (but you knew that already). The value of Facebook is in its [fill the blank] Is it a social interaction platform? Is it an advertising portal? Is it the world's best data mining resource? Is it the future of peer2peer financing ? Could it be... a currency in its own right? Or is it just a universal utility, which will never make any real money at all... Need convincing? Here's Zuckerberg's note to investors (FYI, it's not real. But it is funny and currently doing the rounds): Dear Potential Investor: For years, you've wasted your time on Facebook. Now here's your chance to waste your money on it, too. Tomorrow is Facebook's IPO, and I know what some of you are thinking. How will Facebook be any different from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000"s? For one thing, those bad dot-com stocks were all speculation and hype, and weren't based on real businesses. Facebook, on the other hand, is based on a solid foundation of angry birds and imaginary sheep. Second, Facebook is the most successful social network in the world, enabling millions to share information of no interest with people they barely know. Third, every time someone clicks on a Facebook ad, Facebook makes money. And while no one has ever done this on purpose, millions have done it by mistake while drunk. We totally stole this idea from iTunes. Finally, if you invest in Facebook, you'll be far from alone. As a result of using Facebook for the past few years, over 900 million people in the world have suffered mild to moderate brain damage, impairing their ability to make reasoned judgments. These will be your fellow Facebook investors. With your help, if all goes as planned tomorrow, Facebook's IPO will net $100 billion. To put that number in context, it would take JP Morgan four or five trades to lose that much money. One last thing: what will, I, Mark Zuckerberg, do with the $18 billion I'm expected to earn from Facebook's IPO? Well, I'm considering buying Greece, but that would still leave me with $18 billion. Friend me, Mark Meanwhile, on allocations.. KidDynamite is scouring for details of who got what and from whom. His own story goes as follows: I got 100 shares out of 10,000 that I asked for - and no, as @FelixSalmon asked me, I didn't really want 10,000 shares. I was actually worried that given that they upped the price of the deal, and then upped the size of the deal, that I might get plugged with more shares of a crappy deal that wouldn't trade well. Although I think I am a top-tier client for Etrade, I certainly wouldn't qualify as a top tier client at Merrill or Morgan. Etrade is not a top tier brokerage in terms of allocations - from what I understand. In other words, when the clients at the bottom tier retail brokerages get big allocations, the term you should be thinking about is: ADVERSE SELECTION. You get big allocations of the bad deals, and poor allocations of the good ones. For everything else be sure to follow Tim Bradshaw's liveblog on the FT's Tech blog. Rats, he's just beat us to the spoof letter too. This entry was posted by Izabella Kaminska on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 13:57 and is filed under Capital markets, People. Tagged with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.