Catanach said investors need to be wary of any of Groupon, Zynga or any other new offerings from Internet companies if their stocks surge on the first day. Employees at company headquarters in Chicago donned lime green T-shirts emblazoned with the company's ticker symbol "GRPN" printed in old, ticker-tape-style lettering.
– Groupon has raised $700 million in the biggest initial public offering by a US Internet firm since Google's 2004 IPO. The daily deals leader floated some 5% of the firm for $20 a share, above an initial range of $16 to $18, giving the company a market value of around $12.8 billion, Reuters reports. Groupon isn't making a profit, and there have been plenty of questions raised about its accounting procedures, leading many analysts to consider it overpriced. "It's a flashback to the late '90s. We've seen this game before and we know how it's going to end," an accounting professor tells CNN. Others see Groupon, which began trading on the NASDAQ Friday under the ticker GRPN, as a good buy. Groupon "is a company with permission to market to 150 million consumers daily. No other company in the world has ever had that type of reach," said the chief executive of industry tracker DailyDealMedia.