You have to take everything a hedge fund trader says with a grain of salt. These guys are making bets both upwards and downwards on the same day.
For all I know they've got a program that detects when this article hits the web and that triggers a trade, and then an hour later their program triggers another trade.
It's useful to me. The amount of words doesn't equal the quality of the content.
When my dad asks if he thinks he should buy some Facebook stock, I can tell him the IPO was more about allowing insiders to sell their stock than raise capital. Red flag
As most of us in the weeks leading to the FB IPO, I was also asked by friends and family if they should buy stock and the best answer was not to give hard yes/no's because I simply didn't know how the market will react to something this unprecedented.
However, coming from a value investment and algorithmic asset valuation background I explained the problem to them this way:
A Honda Civic is a great car at $20k? Yes.
Is a Honda Civic a good car at $90k? Probably not.
Could you find someone to buy it at that price? Probably.
Should you buy it at that point? That's what buying FB at a $110bn valuation is.
It's still a great car but I'm not going to buy it for that price.
I personally look for sourcing and well argued points when evaluating the quality of the content. This has neither, since it's just an aside in a bigger article. The submitter didn't even use the blog title which is the standard here.
This is largely true of most IPOs. Until the dot-com bubble IPOs were to be avoided by investors until the company had a few quarters to prove their business delivers consistent returns.
"Mr. Kaplan, the entrepreneur, argues that by styling itself as an idiosyncratic company that has broken the mold in initial offerings, Google is potentially courting disaster."
Maybe in hindsight he meant the opposite of disaster.
This. Can you picture someone telling someone about this site in a conversation? How would you even pronounce it? They need to fix this before moving on to anything else.
Most social activity generates no revenue. It's tragic that we are moving towards a society which sees every relationship as mediated by economic utility.
It shouldn't be a business. It should be a sustainable project. The moment you make it a business, it looses its core value - "by users, for users". That said, the project needs to sustain development and growth of course. The difference is in the goal. Business' goal is to make money, and it's driven by for profit reasons. Such kind of project's goal should be to make a good (user oriented, privacy protecting and so on) social network, and it should be driven by that reason.
And yet almost all businesses/organizations that facilitate human social activity extract some sort of profit: the postal service, telephone companies, ISPs, bars/pubs, and churches (for the cynic), to name a few.
For all I know they've got a program that detects when this article hits the web and that triggers a trade, and then an hour later their program triggers another trade.