Bloomberg adds yet another long piece on Facebook’s IPO. The headliner reveals that the SEC forced Facebook to remove some potentially misleading materials touting its advertising effectiveness from its pre-IPO documentation. The story then goes on at great length talking to Wall Streeters, academics, and individual investors without adding much in the way of new insights or analysis. It closes with this howler from a John Q. Public investor:
“The problem with Facebook is that it’s not a tangible good, and because it’s not a tangible good, people can’t feel and touch it, and it definitely has a huge risk of doing what it did, and that’s to go down.”
Wow. More evidence that normal human beings have no business gambling on IPOs.
Bloomberg does go into some detail about the back-and-forth between the SEC and Facebook. The SEC seems to have done its job, and Facebook successfully raised a ton of money. Did its resulting stock swoon sour the market for consumer social media plays? You bet. Excuse my cynicism, but whose fault is that?
