Disclaimer: I invest in the stock market. All of this is my own opinion. But I think it's relevant as most of you use Twitter.
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The Facebook IPO started out at $38 and then tanked below $20
for a year. Will twitter do the same thing, or will it be the goose that
lay the golden egg? What do you think? |
For those of you who don't trade stock, IPO stands for "Initial Public Offering" and is the day a stock "debuts" on one of the exchanges like the Nasdaq or the S&P 500. I leave the Dow out because the Dow Jones Industrial Average consists only of 30 stocks and they are notoriously selective on which stock is on their roster. To date, GE is the only company that belonged to the original Dow when it was first established. All others have been cast out. Just this week aluminum manufacturer Alcoa, tech giant Hewlett Packard, and Bank of America were thrown out/replaced by Goldman Sachs, Nike, and Visa (Wall Street considers Visa a tech company because they use technology to process payments).
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| This ticker should say "30 stocks out of thousands are surging." |
So whenever you hear the radio announce that the "Dow is up 100 points" or the "Dow is down 140 points", they are saying that 30 stocks out of thousands and thousands of companies in the U.S. are having a good/bad day. I usually roll my eyes and say to myself, "I could care less about the Dow. What's the Nasdaq or the S&P doing?" but I usually have to go online for that information. The Dow gets all the news.
Anyway, there's been a variety of IPO's that have soared this year. We had Noodles & Company (NDLS) that started out at $18 a share and doubled to $36 by the end of the day. Sprouts Farmer's Market (SFM) pretty much followed that same path. But I've had my eye on some that haven't gone public yet. It's a short list of companies that I'd like to try to get in on some of the early gravy although the odds are clearly stacked against me as I have no outside connections and am just a long term investor.
Presently, I own POAGX (run by Primecap) as a mutual fund mostly represented by Nasdaq equities, I own Ford (F) Motor Company (I believe in America), and I own Texas Roadhouse (TXRH-I was persuaded by the difficulty of finding a spot in their parking lot on a Friday night). I want to balance my portfolio a little better by the end of the year by either picking up a financial (Goldman), an entertainment (Lions Gate Films), a retail (Express), or a tech company (Twitter or Square sounds frickin awesome).
With the news that Twitter has filed an S-1 with lead underwriter Goldman Sachs, my interest was piqued. A date hasn't been set, but it'll probably come by Christmas. That's just in time for me to have enough money together to buy a block of shares (100), provided they are reasonably priced. Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn't make much money. According to the news, they generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million (this compared to Facebook's $10 billion). I never bought into Facebook, because I don't like it (I'm glad I didn't because their stock tanked for a year). But Twitter's a little different. I like the whole instant message feel to it and enjoy communicating with my friends and followers over Twitter. And it fills my need for a balanced portfolio by giving me a tech stock!
So I'm asking you guys out there if you are planning on buying some Twitter stock once it goes public.
If you are interested in the other initial public offerings that I have my eye on (I google them once a day to see if there's any news) here's my very very short list:
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The idea behind square is absolute brilliance. Too bad there's already
copycats taking away their market share. I guess that's capitalism. |
1) Square. Square makes those little white boxes you've been seeing everywhere on iPhones, iPads, and iPods that are used to take credit card payments. The idea is simple and brilliant. That's a winning strategy in my book.
2) Smashburger. Every time my friend James comes into town, he sends me a message on my iPhone that reads "Meet me at Smash." That's how much he enjoys the taste of their burgers.Their books, however, have a story that makes me salivate. 30% growth to date and a market analysis that says the U.S. could support 8000 of their restaurants.
3) Uber. On demand driver application startup called "Uber" appeals to all the millennials. In my opinion, millennials are the most entitled, spoiled rotten generation to ever walk the earth. So naturally an application that allows them to spend twice as much as a regular taxi but comes to their location in a super comfy black luxury vehicle has to be a winner. I want to own some of this company. I was so impressed by the snobbiness of Uber that I even have it featured in my book
Caledfwlch (which is filled with lots of rich snobby things like Ivy League college students wearing designer clothes and ordering limousines with their smartphones). As a side note, I even feature a video game machine that cost $40,000 and looks like an egg. Seriously, if we're going to talk about how large the 1% live we might as well go far beyond Sub-zero refrigerators and Wolf appliances, right?
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The name of this super-pretentious video game pod for spoiled children is "Oculas."
The price tag will kill you though. But who cares if you're a billionaire or a crook.
I guess in our country those two things are synonymous. |
By the way, if you are looking for someone to talk stocks or investments with, I welcome those kinds of conversations. I read Barrons, CNBC, the Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, and the Yahoo Finance pages as well as watch Jim Cramer on Mad Money every day of the week. I'm also not rich. I'm just trying to take the meager money I manage to scrape together and invest it wisely in things that I think will outperform my savings account interest rate (as should you).
