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Showing posts from June, 2012

What the Facebook IPO has taught me ... We Are terrible at how we value things

The much hyped about Facebook IPO turned out to be a huge embarrassment when the price slid well below its IPO price. The IPO price of $38 per share values Facebook as a company at $104billion. In 2007, Microsoft made a $15billion bid for Facebook. If we believe in the power of averages, that makes Facebook worth around half of what the IPO said it was. Even at that sort of price, it is tremendously suspicious. How did people decide that a social network which originally started as people sharing their lives is worth $104billion? This puts it way above a lot of firms that do manufacturing and services. Once conclusion we can draw is that, actually, maybe people don't really think that it is worth $104billion but is buying it so that they can sell it to some fool who thinks it could be worth more, in which case this is just plain greed. The other conclusion we can draw is that we are just terrible at valuing things - a disease evident in how we value Jesus Christ hence Chr...