Why GOOG is “After Hours” while FB is “Pre-market”?
It looks like GOOG did not have a pre-market trade until 7:14 am ET, so Google Finance was still reporting the last trade it had, which was in the after-hours session yesterday. FB, on the other hand, was trading like crazy after-hours yesterday and pre-market today as it had an earnings report yesterday. Pre-Market trading activity is shown on the site from 4:15 - 9:30 AM (actual trading starts at 4:00 AM EST) The NASDAQ Stock Market Trading Sessions (Eastern Time) Pre-Market Trading Hours from 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Market Hours from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. After-Market Hours from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/about/trading-schedule.aspx#ixzz38OtcISrq In this case GOOG did not trade in the Pre-market until that time and FB was.
I like the Australian “standard”*   Best Before:  For the retailer: Means the retailer should not complain to the supplier if the product has gone bad after this date.  Used by:  For the consumer; means the customer should not complain to the retailer if the product has gone bad after this date.  Ie it has nothing to do with is it safe to consume it has everything to do with legal liability with a touch of forced replacement.  * I don’t know if it’s a standard or just something that producers do. Bull. Facebook is exploding overseas, where local knockoff flavors of Facebook have long held dominance, as they improve their internationalization. Even in the US, kids aren't giving up Facebook for other sites, but instead tieing in other sites TO facebook - you can tweet straight from your news feed, you can share your tumblr posts with your friends through facebook. Pinterest doesn't have the same utility as Facebook, but instead only serves a small portion of the features to an even smaller portion of the Facebook user base. And foursquare? Completely different market, I don't know why the author failed to realize that a location sharing app is *completely* different than a social media site. Not only that, but kids will become mayor of a place on Foursquare only so as to brag about it on Facebook!  This article makes the grievous mistake of thinking that just because people visit other sites *besides* Facebook, that this is a sign of Facebook's imminent demise. This is such an overused news subject - the death of facebook, that it's becoming a major cliche. The fact of the matter is, Facebook was grossly over valued on the expectation that they'll continue their exponential growth pattern, but they won't. Facebook will continue to grow and dominate the market because they have the best and the brightest programmers and they really understand their market. Just don't expect them growing like they have in the past five years all over again. Their reputation is still stellar, just because people we're dumb enough to buy in at 38$ doesn't reflect on facebook, it reflects on the underwriters.  You think FB would have said no with the IPO price had been 100$? "The ""price"" is the price of the last transaction that actually took place. According to Motley Fool wiki: A stock price is determined by what was last paid for it. During market hours (usually weekdays from 9:30AM-4:00PM eastern), a heavily traded issue will see its price change several times per second. A stock's price is, for many purposes, considered unchanged outside of market hours. Roughly speaking, a transaction is executed when an offer to buy matches an offer to sell. These offers are listed in the Order Book for a stock (Example: GOOG at Yahoo Finance).  This is actively updated during trading hours. This lists all the currently active buy (""bid"") and sell (""ask"") orders for a stock, and looks like this:  You'll notice that the stock price (again, the last sale price) will (usually*) be between the highest bid and the lowest ask price. * Exception: When all the buy or sell prices have moved down or up, but no trades have executed yet." Ok thanks for this. I am curious, how would they know its facebook that is directing these increased sales. If it's TV or radio, you can tell by increased revenues from increased spots. But for a facebook ad or a google ad, unless this is the only form of marketing, how are you sure (unless again you can ask, did you hear from us by google or fb) its from one of these websites. My thinking was for a physical product when i made this comment. I have a hard time giving them a P/E higher than 25 on the absolute top end. Given current numbers, that takes another ~60% off their share price putting them right around $10. Now... that's my top end estimate, I'd probably be willing to buy right around $8.  In order to support the IPO price, the models I've seen come in at projecting an average growth rate of 40% YoY for the next 5 years. If FB pulled that off, they'd be growing ~5X over the next 5 years (once compounded). As it stands, they've got 900B+ users. Doubling that would require a significant number of new people to start coming on line - 5x that would be impossible.  So... next option... They figure out how to monetize existing users/traffic better. It's possible - they don't do a very good job with this as it stands, but they've got a fine line to walk. They need to pull it off without driving users, or advertisers, away.  Suppose they were able to double their user base. They'd still need to do ~2.5x better per user to make the numbers. This doesn't take into account that the next billion users are significantly less valuable as an audience than the first billion. (Not in human terms, but in financial/marketing terms.)  I'm willing to give them a 20% growth rate for the next 5 years. That'd put them at a bit better than 2.5x over that time. It's still a stretch. That should put them in the same P/E range as GOOG (currently trading at a P/E of 17ish).  Any price higher than $10/share at this point is gambling on their ability to crack monetization. The higher you go, the higher you think the odds are.  One last thing I'd keep in mind. Most of the early employees with options are locked out of selling for the first 6 months after the IPO. There's a fairly large number of shares that will become available when that time is up. I'm curious to see how many of the early employees call in rich and go start new companies. (Think about what happened to paypal after being sold to ebay - yelp, youtube, and others all came out of the early employees.) I'd be watching the quarterly reports through the quarter ending 12/31. The numbers at that point will give a better gauge of a proper valuation. I absolutely wouldn't hold shares of FB during the period when employees first have their chance to cash their lottery tickets. You cannot trade in pre-IPO shares of companies like Facebook without being an accredited investor. If a website or company doesn't mention that requirement, they are a scam. A legitimate market for private shares is SecondMarket. "Not saying the trading activity in FACE is related or unrelated.. But where do you see a 10Q released on 3/31?  First of all, 3/31 is the last day of Q1. It is virtually impossible to have an entire 10Q prepared the same day that the quarter ends. Most 10Q/Ks are released approximately 6 weeks after the close of the quarter.  In addition, look at EDGAR:  http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&amp;match=&amp;CIK=face&amp;filenum=&amp;State=&amp;Country=&amp;SIC=&amp;owner=exclude&amp;Find=Find+Companies&amp;action=getcompany  The Q1 10Q wasn't released until May 4.  On a side note - I was on a roadshow for an unrelated IPO a couple weeks back and the FB IPO consistently came up with brokers. Probably 80% said that their number 1 question from clients was ""How can I get a part of the facebook IPO.""" They are intertwined, that recommendation part is huge for both Google and Amazon when it comes to shopping. I bet Amazon took a lot of money from by having this smart recommendation system, no need to google it. Before you had to search for each company to order their product. Amazon means less search for them. They might be in different business but it doesn't mean one isn't shadowing the other. Ahh... Well I joined twitter when they first started (mid 2003 or 2004?), and handles like @john were available. Annoyed with myself I didn't bother to snag any actually, could have made a mint. But that said, I still use it today and I've never noticed a single ad. Facebook in the other hand, is teaming with ads - some I even *want* to click on. So I guess that should still answer the question. Unless McDonalds is going to start sending me private messages to get my attention? I think there is a huge difference to what Google does with intangible assets as compared to a company such as Facebook. Facebook floated and as people thought it was highly overvalued the share price plummeted. Google on the other hand has many years of relatively stable growth and share price in a market that is generally pretty well informed.  So I disagree. For Facebook and such companies, their ability to earn billions only happens through an IPO because that business model doesn't generate revenue. Without some drastic change that no one has mentioned, Facebook cannot make a profit, much less multi-billion dollar yearly profits.   So you launch an IPO to rip off the suckers Here's the reality: Facebook was forced into an IPO because of stupid federal regulations.  They would have happily continued to stay closely held and raked in money while maintaining their mystique.  If there is any problem, start at the root. I've never thought about the difference in goals between manufacturers and local businesses...Hmmm, your knowledge about the facebook ad model might be able to help me with a personal project I'm doing.  If you care to take a whack at it, read on:  What interested me before the IPO was the debate about the **value** of FB's ad model.  To get  a better idea, I wanted to use regression modeling test the efficacy of advertising on Facebook compared to traditional media (TV, magazines, banner ads...).  I haven't quite got how the model is going to *prove* the relative effectiveness/ineffectiveness of Sponsored Ads and Fan Pages.  This really depends on the kind of independent variables I'm able to draw from the data sets I can find and this a lot of this information is hard to come by...  Any pointers on where I should look? The fact that the option is deep in the money will be reflected in the market price of the option so you can just sell it at a profit. If there's a (n almost) guaranteed profit to be had, however, you can always find someone who will lend you the money to cover the exercise... they'll charge you interest, however!