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The Almighty Buck

Cobalt IPO Opens...High 79

Posted by Hemos from the putting-red-hat-to-shame dept.
GrenDel Fuego was the first to write with the news of Cobalt's rather succesful IPO. It's gone from 22$ opening shares to a now current of 146$ per share. You can check where it's currently at as well.
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Cobalt IPO Opens...High More

Cobalt IPO Opens...High

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  • Not just Doonesbury, but also Sherman's Lagoon [slagoon.com]. It all starts with a statue curse on the Internet and the founder of Yahoo!.

    Check it out: Archive of Sherman's Lagoon [dnai.com]

    It continues through at least today.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
  • I am not a stock analyst, but consider - did all of the company's shares go out on the open market? Or did a large percentage stay "inside the company", so to speak? If the latter, then it indicates that they have additional shares to sell later... albeit at a slightly lower price (due to dilution), but still at a considerably higher price than $22 (US) per share.

    I'm sure they only sold off a small part of the company in the IPO. I'm guessing 5-10% or so is typical.

    Sure, they can sell more stock for the higher price. But they could have done that even if the IPO price was $100, and it went up to $140, so that is no reason to have a low IPO price.

    Of course, no one goes IPO at $100, so they should have made a five-way split and IPOd at $20. But that is just a technicality.

    I'm not a stock analyst either, but I work in Silicon Valley, and I get to hear a lot of IPO talk.
  • Yeah, explain it to me, too. :) We've been looking at this all week, and wondering how one gets to buy IPO at $22. Especially when it is, at the same time, up 565%, but first tradew were at $140.

    Someone out there care to shed some light on these contradictions?

  • I know...I know.....and just to make it impossible instead of really bloody hard....I'm not a US citizen which rules me out of the IPO game :(
  • You are the first person I've, well, "met" who reads Sherman's Lagoon that neither I nor my friend Matt (who introduced me) introduced to the strip.

    Another one I bookmark and read regularly is Liberty Meadows [creators.com]. Funny stuff.

    Now back to your regularly scheduled Slashdot...

    Jay (=
  • You probably won't read this, since it's late, but I'm resonding anyway.

    My original post stated that I was unable to get in at that price, no matter what I did. So my starting point would have been 139. With RedHat I had almost a whole day to get it under 50.
    Steven Rostedt
  • Not only that... they own what, 25% of Rebel.com.

    So much opportunity... and they can loose money, too!

    But, unfortunately, the NetWinder doesn't have a cool cobalt box... and hasn't been developed much in the past two years. Sad... great concept, dead before its time.

    (yes, i do own stock in 'em)
  • You callin' me an ubergeek? :p
  • Well, if you're actually contributing code instead of cashing in on the IPOs - yeah, you're a real ubergeek.

    That doesn't mean that ubergeeks don't get stock options or IPO shares for their contribs, just that it's not your focus - the code is.

  • It did about what one would expect, given that few shares were offered in the IPO (most are still held) and it was considered to be one of the Red Hot IPOs for the month.

    As to how long the market will take to deflate back to a reasonable level ... for this stock, expect a good price about 30+ days from now, with a better price around 94 days and another chance in 180 days. Those are the periods when large blocks of shares are allowed to trade.

    Personally, I thought they priced it low so that other people would want to buy more Linux IPOs, given that the profit potential is so high. I'm not sure if I got any allocation through MSDW, and know I didn't through E*Trade, but I'm holding for a longer period anyway.

    Next one is VA Linux Systems, formerly VA Research. I've got some IPO shares of UPS.com, which should also be Red Hot, so I'm not complaining, but I keep hoping I'll get more Linux IPOs, because I love making the PHB think Linux is the best thing since English Muffins (or was that Hot Buttered Penguins)?

  • Yo! Then we can either follow this stuff or be ignored by the real ubergeeks who actually crank out code most of the time.

  • 1. Run over someone who got options with a truck, assume their identity, and cash in.
    2. Work for a brokerage firm that takes the IPO public.
    3. Marry someone who can give you Friends and Family IPO shares.
    4. Be an exec at the firm that's IPO'd.
    5. Contrib to code from the IPO firm.
    6. Have more than $100K in an account at a major firm like Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and trade a bunch.
    7. Be a famous actor, so you can get them to give you the Friends and Family.

    All proven to work.

    You can also try your luck with E*Trade ($50K+ account helps), Goldman Sachs, and a bunch of other firms that may have lesser requirements.
  • Well, I only have limited experiance, but here's what I've been able to figure out. It may not be completely accurate.

    In order to get in on the IPO you need to know someone at the company, or at the financial firm handling the IPO basically.

    The stock starts at the IPO price, and is made available to brokers first, then by the time it's made available to the public, it's already inflated (the first trade). The percent change of the day uses the IPO price since that's what it was technically worth before trading.
  • I don't really get all this IPO madness enough to put down money (feels like playing roulette). I didn't say Cobalt is a good investment, just a better one than RedHat (but market hype makes all the difference, doesn't it?)

  • Extraordinary popular delutions and the madness of (Score:3)

    by john wave ( 102563 ) on Friday November 05, 1999 @06:41AM (#1560674)

    Maybe you should read Mackay's classic Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds [unc.edu]

    Volume 2 [unc.edu]

    Volume 3 [unc.edu]

  • OK, so unless I completely misunderstand this whole stock market thing, in order for the value to have reached 146, somebody must have paid $146 for shares of Cobalt stock. But who's doing this? It's common knowledge that new tech stocks start off low, skyrocket to an absurd number, then fall back to reality over the next few months and start behaving rationally. So somebody who bought at 146 is going to have to wait years for it to go up to beyond that.

    Are these daytraders, hoping to buy at 146 and sell 20 minutes later at 147? Or people who just don't get it? Or what?

  • Well, they don't just "sell ssh", they sell security, including something called IPsec.

    Quite a bunch of my friends just turned a lot "richer" today; assumably as company workers they got their shares from top of stack. Free beer?-)
  • I signed up with Wit Capital (www.witcapital.com) in the beginning of the year with the intent of buying net IPOs. I have had some success with certain stocks, and also gotten some dogs. When I saw WitCap offering Cobalt last week, I jumped and signed up. Guess what, I didn't get it. There just weren't enough shares to go around. Cobalt issued 5 M shares, and I doubt WitCap got more than 500K (the bigger firms, especially the lead underwriter, in this case, Goldman Sachs, get the lion shares). So with all the people who are interested, it came down to a random number generator.

    It's easy to say, "I could've," but in reality, you couldn't. Not only that, WitCap requires you to hold the newly issued IPO for 60 days (or else you are a "flipper" and no more IPO's for you!) and who knows where the stock will be in 60 days.

    Sporadic

  • Will the madness never end?

    (I just gotta get myself in the stock market...)
  • Why didn't I buy a gazillion of these stock before the IPO.....(and now to include a favorite topic on slashdot)

    Imagine the beowulf cluster I could build with all the money I'd earn!
  • Cobalt plans to use the offering's proceeds for various purposes, including working capital, funding operating losses, capital expenditures and potential acquisitions of complementary businesses, products and technologies.

    I wonder what/who they might be interested in?
  • They take a PC, put Linux on it, and offer it as a server, just valued added economics.

    What a wild ride.

    George

  • Watch Yourself (Score:3)

    by J.P. ( 59332 ) on Friday November 05, 1999 @05:36AM (#1560682)
    Do yourself a favor and don't try chasing this stock at these levels. You could easily end up as road kill. Sentiment in the market is decidedly bullish as compared to the sentiment at the time of the Red Hat IPO. Buy it on pullbacks if you think you must own it. Or buy Red Hat as an alternative if you must play the Linux theme. (Disclosure, I own Red Hat).
  • Slashdot should have a financial advise page, what stocks are rumored to IPO at a couple of bucks and then go up by 4 or 500% later that day ;)

  • Well Its amazing to see the business world recognize the TRUE value of an enterprise which bases its high technology products around a tried and true OS - Linux. I read an article about cobalt in Wired earlier this year, and they chose Linux as a proven product. It saved them 2 years of development time in getting their servers to the market and guess what? The business/investment community recognized the sheer brilliance of the guys there ;)
    Kudos to you folks at Cobalt
  • Any stock analysts out there? You've gotta think this is just absolutely nuts. The company usually opens the shares at what /they/ think they'll sell them at. How come the tech stocks always exceed what the company thought they'd sell at? How long until the market deflates back to a more sane level?

    These are important questions for anyone following this stuff...



    --

  • Not surprising... (Score:3)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Friday November 05, 1999 @05:40AM (#1560686) Homepage Journal
    ... they have a good product and I would guess pretty solid margins. They are doing all the config and setup for dedicated web boxes. I have one doing, DHCP, NAT, DNS, firewall, webserving, e-mail, all with what amounts to a point and click interface (and a bit of hand tweaking). My box has been up for 5 months solid after one reboot (my bad) out of it's box.

    I think the Home Web Server(tm) will become more common as families set up their own e-mail boxes, and a family web-page on a dedicated pipe. Since the same box can also serve to share a 'Net connection and act as a firewall it's quite a deal. Plus, and this is a big plus, they look dang cool, especially in the dark. (I'm talking about the Qube not the Raq)

    Good product + looks cool + runs Linux = big IPO
  • If a hardware company that shows losses is worth SO much....

    Why was IBM so low a few years ago?
    Why did Apple drop to sub $15...it was loosing money too.

    http://www.pelagius.com/AppleRecon/991001a.html

    With quotes like:
    The markets have been "living on borrowed time with borrowed money" ever since the first
    Fed rate cut in the fall of '98.

    the Fed will assiduously remain in "Full Blown Bubble Protection Mode."

    And greed is not a "Bad thing" as long as it's kept in perspective. But the majority of the people are not
    keeping it in perspective. That's the reason why so many are willing to push a lot of stocks way out of whack; the most
    telling are the Internet stocks.

    It may be a New Market, but markets cycle, and the higher the upside, the lower the downside.

  • While RedHat is building brand identity in the Linux distribution space, I believe Cobalt is in the business space that ultimately will change the world: turning the server into a commodity.

    If the basis for stock price/market valuation for an Internet/dot-com/etc. is really based on expectation of ability to significantly change the computing world a la Netscape (rather than mere celebrity value), I would bet my money on Cobalt rather than RedHat.

  • A cartoon I remember seeing (Score:3)

    by Uruk ( 4907 ) on Friday November 05, 1999 @05:27AM (#1560690)
    I believe this was in the New Yorker. One of those one-paned cartoons.

    A bum sits on the street holding a sign that says "Spare a dime?". He is totally ignored. Look down the street a half a block, and a man is sitting on the street with people crowded around throwing money at him in large amounts. He is holding a sign that says "SpareADime.com"

    Just goes to show that in some economic climates you get a feeling that you just can't lose. I think that the stock price for a lot of those high tech companies is vastly overvalued, and therefore bad for the economy, but investors do what they want to, because the stock market and the economy are not driven by rational decisions, but by greed.

    I think RedHat is a fabulous company, and of course I wish I had bought their stock when it IPO'd, but I think that even though it's fallen significantly from its highs right after the IPO it's still overvalued. Same with these Cobalt clowns - I don't mean to come down on the company really, I'm just thinking that you can expect their stock price to take a nosedive, and then straighten itself out and begin rising steadily probably in the $80 range or so if Redhat has taught us anything.

    One thing is for sure: In IPO land, unless you get in right at the offering price, it sounds like speculative day trading to me. I guarantee many people are going to lose their ass because of cobalt stock within the next 2-3 weeks because of profit takers realizing that the market has gone irrationally high on the price and taking their profits.

    David
  • Looks like it's taking RedHat up with it. I'm betting a simular thing will happen when LinuxCare IPO's.

    If only I had enough money set aside to actually ride the wave.
  • It'd be really cool if slashdot had a customizable slashbox with quotes it in. I bet they could make a deal with Yahoo or something to provide it, and clicking on the stocks could take you to profiles at Yahoo biz.
  • I sincerely hope this is only getting posted because the stock jumped idiotically high. I used to read news.com almost as much as /. but now it's gone from a tech news site to a financial news site focused on tech stocks. I'd hate to see /. get littered with headlines about "product offerings" and companies "beating analyst estimates". It really doesn't interest me in the slightest.
  • Hopefully this bubble will gradually deflate instead of an eventual burst.

    Cobalt is a good company with some nice products -- but looking at their profit potential, they are being bought at many time over their worth.

    Of course, ask any idiot trader and they will tell you that tech stocks are the new wave because we're having a "revolution".

    What's happened is that there has been a supply and demand shift for this industry in the past 3 years -- so people just think they can ride it for all they can get. However, the economy as a whole doesn't have too much to worry about unless inflation creeps back up again. It's quite possible, but I think Greenspan has the macroeconomy under control.
    ----------
  • Well, now Cobalt (having shipped 17,000 servers) is kicking the crap out of SGI in terms of market cap. Those guys really should put out a high-end Linux server appliance anways. Cobalt/Rebel.com have not even come close to sewing up the market, and the SGI boys have more than enough engineering expertise. --JRZ
  • Actually, I think the next IPO is Andover... right around Thanksgiving.
  • So why do companies continue to go public at ten to twenty dollars, and then watch as that stock zooms to fifty, a hundred, or even more? They are losing lots of capitalization, by letting all of the investors "flip" the stock, right? That money should go to the company, right?

    Because they have to price it "realistically".
    Cobalt is a $100 million company... that is within reason. $700 million.... well...

    A lot of it does go to the company however; because the top executives hold the majority of those shares, and there is nothing stopping them from selling their own poersonaly shares andretaining that capital for company use.
  • There is a trading method known as "shorting". I'll get into that in a minute. "Normal" trading is when you go "long" - you buy stock in anticipation that the stock price will rise. Your risk (of losing the investment) is basically made up of a) how likely the stocks are to drop in price and b) how many of them you have.
    You can attach a reasonable guess at where you think you want to "chicken out" and cash in your stock, at a higher price than you paid for them. Basically, you buy stock if you think the stock price will rise.
    Shorting, on the other hand, is used when you think the stock price will drop. You borrow stock from your broker (your broker will borrow it on your behalf for a small fee (about 1-3% although YMMV)). Your broker will "call" you on this at some point (at either a fixed time in the future, or at any time before this, depending on your broker's stock borrow conditions - we'll assume in 1 week with no early call). When you are called, you must return all stocks you borrowed. So let's say you shorted 100 stocks at $146 - this will cost you your stock borrow fees only at this point, but you can sell the immediately for $14,600. Now, in one week's time, let's say Cobalt are trading at $10. You buy 100 stocks (worth $1,000) to return to your broker. You've just made $13,600 (minus your stock borrow costs) for shuffling money around!
    Sounds too good, though doesn't it? You're right. If the price continues to rise, you lose big time. Say that the stock price continues to $200 when you must return your borrowed stocks. You now have to buy 100 stocks ($20,000) to return, so your loss is $5,400 plus stock borrow. The danger of shorting is that there is no brake on the upper price of a stock - if the market is really confident in the stock, it can skyrocket. You can predict what your maximum profit can be (ie if the stocks are near worthless by the time you have to return them) but not what your maximum possible loss could be.
    As there are big movers and shakers shorting these stocks over time, you will see a rallying fluctuation in the stock price after the first dump, as traders are buying back their borrowed stock, driving the market high again. This causes increased volatility in the market (amount the price fluctuates over time), and makes investment riskier.
    Basically, for a small investor rather than speculator, shorting stocks is a Bad Idea. Be aware, I am not an investment professional, don't sue me if you act on any of the above and lose money (I know how much you US guys love your lawsuits :) ).
    If you want a better description of stock market machinations, have a look at The Motley Fool. [motleyfool.com]
  • Can anyone explain why it is considered "successful" to sell stock for $20 that you could have sold for $140?

    It seems like a very bad deal for the company to me!

    Sure, you want the IPO to be a good investment, but increases like this just shows a severe misjudgment of what price to charge, doesn't it?
  • Well, for the average investor it is very, very difficult to get shares at the offering.

    They go to institutional buyers and top clients of the underwriter's brokers.

    A lot of the online brokers will have a lottery system where you might luck out and be able to get 100 shares... but generally you will only get offered crap. If you do not purchase the crap, a lot of times you lose the chance to get anything that is good. Though I am of the opinion that online brokers are a mistake.

    After these shares are issued at the offering price... the holders then have the oportunity to sell those to the general public (the stock market essentially). Usually not too many shares are issued... and if there is a lot of demand for the company, the price has to rise in order to meet that demand. So you see what is called a "Gap Opening". The price instantly goes from $22 to $139... there is no in-between.

    That is all the stock market is: Supply and Demand.

    Keep in mind that there has to be a seller for every buyer in the market. If there are more buyers, the price has to rise to a level to incite more people to be willing to sell their shares in order to meet the demand of those who want to buy the company.

    In the short term, the market is driven on these emotions... and very hard to predict (over 90% of day traders lose money).

    The only way to make real money... and continually do it is to buy, hold and accumulate quality companies (at reasonable levels of course).

    Do not waste your time with IPO's... they are a losing game. Even when you can get them. In fact, of the Initial Public Offerings that have "made it" (companies are still in existance), they have a combined average annual return of around 4% over the past two decades. That is meager at best.

  • The way to get rich is to be rich (as long as you can avoid "the way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one" disease)

  • According to quicken [quicken.com] It opened at $139. It's only around 144 (did I just say "only"?). So you couldn't make the big money like you could have with RHAT. Unless of course you could have bought the IPO. I know I couldn't so this isn't a big buy for me. I'll wait till it comes down to around 80.

    It looks like we are shifting from the dot.com companies to the free/open source companies. ;)

    Steven Rostedt
  • It is (and has been) unbelievable.

    But it has been pointed out that this is very different from a typical internet IPO Hey! We have a cool web site that loses tons of money, but we are going to make it all back on banner ads!!!

    For instance, the server market is expected to grow to a $15.8 billion dollar industry by the year 2003 (it is $2.2 billion right now). That is about a 700% increase (about doubling every year).

    Consider the company:
    101 employees
    revenues of $7.7 million for most recent 6 months
    net loss of $8.2 million for same period.
    and some big time competitors
    that does not impress me too much.

    But that is enough to make it into a $700 million dollar company :)

    They raised $110 million for themselves... that will certainly give them some clout and freedom, but will it last after the capital is drained?

    If you buy into Cobalt right now... you are betting that they will be able to increase their revenue by 1,000% in the next few years (and that is assuming a 100% profit margin... which uhhh... is not quite possible, so consider it is much more than 1,000 times). That is considerably larger than the market is expected to grow... so they need to be buying *A LOT* of companies and stealing a shit load of market share in the future. Things need to go VERY well for them.

    In other words, a pretty risky investment right now.
  • Are bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. Just hope, for all the investors, that the string doesn't break. They won't finish at their highest value, or anything close. Personally, I don't think this will do as well as Red Hat. That was stable, for the forst 2-3 days, compared to this.

    Even so, I reckon it'll do well. I think the market is finally realising that there -is- such a thing as a free lunch, if you include stone soup. Distributed efforts make for better bets than closed, isolated companies, in their ivory towers.

  • Could someone explain how IPOs work. If I look at yahoo they say that Cobalt has changed +554%.
    But the Day's Range goes from 130 - 158. So if I had put in a buy order on Cobalt below $130 at the beginning of the day I wouldn't have got any stock?

    Sighh, some day I have to learn how the stock market works...
  • I have to laugh because doonesbury [doonesbury.com] has had a story line on this very topic. This whole thing is just like a comic strip!

    The strip in todays paper was even better!

    Steven Rostedt
  • Hopefully this means they will now be able to afford a decent support department. Of course big companies probably just hand out deadpan brainless answers as well.

    I am not a big fan!

  • Regardless of their product, the equation works a bit more like this: Shitty/marginal/great/whocares product + not_a_web_portal + .com = big IPO In their S1, they state with PRIDE that they had sold over 11,000 units... In most industries, that would be called a failed product. They made 3.5million dollars last year - sounds pretty good, right? NO - they LOST 10 million in making it! Another neat example would be TiVo, a company with a multiBILLION dollar valuation on revenues of (ready?) $41,000 last year. Hell, *I* made more than that! Maybe I should consider an IPO...
  • Data Fellows (makers of the F-Prot virus protection software and resellers of SSH) was listed today on Helsinki Stock Exchange and went from 7.7 euros selling price to 27.45 euros. The main owner of the company, Risto Siilasmaa, instantly became the richest man in the country.

    So, it's not only US investors who are insane but it applies globally.

    In Finland the allocations in IPOs are much more fair than in the US: All public is usually allowed to participate and the "public investors" quota is more or less evenly allocated to all the participants. In this case, everyone got only 25 shares :)

  • Please keep in mind that we are dealing with a rare market... IPO's are rarely this strong. Infact, the last time thre was this much demand for IPO's was the last 20's (not to sound too ominous).

    Even in today's market, for every great IPO, there are 20 other duds.

    The fund is also not quite what you think it is.
    The majority of it is not actively invested in IPO's per say... but companies like Amazon, E-Trade and Radio One.

    In the past 3 months (a very good IPO market), the fund is actually down 6%.
  • Man, I really hope that Corel becomes identified as a Linux stock. I could really deal with seeing my 520 shares jump from like $6-$7 a piece to to $100+ range. Personally, I don't really care that the market is horridly overvalued so long as I get rich. =)

    I'm hoping that they will when they show off their distro at Comdex -- Cowpland is talking right after Bob Young, so I have hope.

    ----

  • Weren't these the people that left root's history file web accessible?
  • I agree. If these places would go with OpenIPO, they would get alot more money to themselves, and less to inventment bankers. While the underwriter does perform a service to warrant their fee, no one "earns" US$1e8 in a day, especailly not for screwing their client and pricing the stock too low. Are the news blurb for the IPO price pop really worth the megabucks it costs the new company? That's some really expensive PR.
  • The stock market (as far as the Internet and high-tech sectors are concerned) is no longer fueled by company profits, strong market forcasts and innovative products. The stock market is now one big giant casino.

    In Vegas, you can get a hotel room for $15 at a semi-decent place, a tasty lobster and filet mignon dinner for $8, only because the market is fueled by gambling. The casinos inside the hotels make enough money to cover every other expense incurred by the hotel. Drinks are free, room and board are almost free, which would put a normal hotel out of business. But the casino keeps them in business.

    Wall Street is Silicon Valley's great big casino. The market's desire to gamble away it's money on stocks (big money, big money, come on Black 47!!!! Papa needs a brand new bag!!!) keeps the Internet company's in business. Look at Amazon.com. No profit. What's that? That's right, no profit. None. At all (AFAIK). If an autmobile company posted 4 straight years in the red, they would GO OUT OF BUSINESS. Even if they did own their own stock, that would only hurt them. But as long as an Internet company owns some of it's own stock (i.e. has a cut of the casino's earnings) it doesn't need to worry about profits (charging for drinks and lobster.) But this ONLY applies to high-tech for some reason. Imagine if Exxon lost tens of millions ever year, maybe even every quarter. Their stock price wouldn't soar at each SEC filing. It's amazing. An Internet stock will jump as much as %20 at a bad earnings report. As long as they lost less than analysts predicted (Jimmy the Greek.) "Yes, we lost $250 million dollars this quarter, but analysts predicted that we would lose $270 million, and that justifies our stock jumping from $12 to $159 per share." It makes no sense, and eventually, people are going to figure this out. When people start selling their stocks to cash in on their Internet wealth, the value will drop dramatically because there simply isn't enough value in the average Internet company to justify the outrageous prices of the average Internet stock.
    ------------------------------------------ ----------------

  • Re:Corel (Score:1)

    by Micah ( 278 )
    That's exactly what I was thinking. Corel is a real company with real products. They will soon release a butt kicking Linux distribution and several butt-kicking apps for it. If Linux is so hot, and Corel so heavily invested in it, Corel *should* be at least at $50 by now with all the hype.

    I have 500 shares myself, and perhaps I'll buy more... we'll see...

    Also there's Inprise. Their stock is dirt cheap and they have a good deal resting on the success of Linux.
  • Years, ago, when Netscape did their own IPO, there was a list floating around SillyCon valley of calls that Netscape supposedly received before the release. (Someone may still have a copy; if so, please publish the URL.)

    As luck would have it, I was just cleaning up my bookmarks and look [hotwired.com] what I just found...you need to scroll down a bit.

  • Yeah, in their RaQ1 product ... but the same day it was discovered it was fixed and has long since disappeared as a problem. The reason was that on the original RaQ1 all user accounts were inside the site's "web" directory. RaQ2 and RaQ3 have users isolated above the site's "web" directory.
  • Well...the opening prices was really 22 and not 139. The first trade was 139. Folks who had the advantage of getting in at 22 (institutional investors and people close to the brokers) did very well...better then redhat.


    Pat-
  • ...increases like this just shows a severe misjudgment of what price to charge, doesn't it?

    Not necessarily.

    I am not a stock analyst, but consider - did all of the company's shares go out on the open market? Or did a large percentage stay "inside the company", so to speak? If the latter, then it indicates that they have additional shares to sell later... albeit at a slightly lower price (due to dilution), but still at a considerably higher price than $22 (US) per share.

    They may have underestimated the market value of their company, and that may have reduced the amount they could have made, but over the long term, they will have developed stockholders who have a particularly vital interest in the company... if nothing else, to regain the value that they lost in the price drop from $146 (US) / share to the current quote. :)

  • Just imagine the geeky profiles that we all could have --- and all the money we could make :)

    But, it's only a dream, right Rob?
  • >the stock market and the
    >economy are not driven by rational decisions, but by greed.

    Years, ago, when Netscape did their own IPO, there was a list floating around SillyCon valley of calls that Netscape supposedly received before the release. (Someone may still have a copy; if so, please publish the URL.)

    One story that I remembered summed up the entire exchange. Some guy calls, eager to talk to the CFO. He is told that the CFO is out of town (obviously peddling interest in the stock). But caller has an import question about Netscape's IPO.

    ``Maybe someone else can help you. What is your question?"

    ``Uh, what is an IPO?"

    Could it be that the lusers who annoy the help desk are the same ones who bid up tech-related IPOs? Naw . . .


    Geoff

  • Well, I had an order in to pay as high as 50/share but, needless to say, that probably won't execute.

    For those frusturated about not getting in (as I am), I've been looking at this:


    They claim to leverage their "institutional" nature to get in on IPOs, plus they also invest in recently-IPO'd-companies. Could be a way for some of us to get a piece of the pie.

    At least this shows strength for Linux-related companies. Hopefully VA and Andover will see such success...


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