Groupon [3]

On December 2010, Groupon rejected or maybe never even considered an offer from Google to buy the company for 6 billion dollars. In 2011 the IPO came out and as I suspected back then this company did not have the "core" to be a sustainable business. The stock price is now at $4 and talks about outing Mason are in place now. Not long before we see this as a penny stock and the lesson for me will be, never ever reject and offer from Google and never ever invest in a company that has rejected an offer from Google.

The underlying reasons may be greed, pride or lack of judgement. The first two are bad enough but at least they get you far. Lack of judgement once lost is like when you lose your luck. I think that even if Mason leaves the company, there is not much left to do to bring it back, we are getting emails from 100 companies, offering deals and the business model has imploded, who is not tired of getting emails with bargains?

What's with the French Traders!!

• Jérôme Kerviel, born 11 January 1977,  French trader who has a pending appeal of his conviction in the January 2008 Société Générale trading loss incident for breach of trust, forgery and unauthorized use of the bank's computers, resulting in losses valued at €4.9 billion.
• Fabrice Tourre, Fabulous Fab, French born, is a Goldman Sachs Vice President who was charged with securities fraud by the SEC on April 16th 2010. The SEC claims that he had misrepresented facts while selling CDOs to investors.
• Bruno Iksil, a London-based JPMorgan trader. It was Mr. Iksil, a French-born trader who is part of the chief investment office, who acquired the credit-default swaps that led to the $2 billion trading loss disclosed on Thursday.

Goldman Sachs and the Smith Resignation Letter

Almost 10 hours have passed since the news about the reasons why Greg Smith left GS was out in the open. This resulted to be an inconvenient truth for many people, which put pressure on the rest of employees that see wrongly things done in their companies and keep quiet. The Smith letter, remind us, that in fact we can do something but again is inconvenient. So far the opinion have judged Smith more than Goldman Sachs,it is quiet outrageous.  "The right way to quit is to just resign and move on, and keep it quiet," says Laura Hill, president of Careers in Motion LLC, a career-coaching firm in New York City. What kind of an advise is this, who is going to put on the table the wrong things within a company? If people are coached like this no wonder why what happen in 2008 happened.

Facebook IPO

The filing of the Facebook IPO is coming a little bit sooner than expected, bringing a lot of excitement to the stock market, something like the LinkedIn IPO last year. Wall Street always like to show that becoming rich overnight (not being the IPO company owner) is still possible and of course who wouldn't like that?

The Facebook IPO will be the most important of our time after Google, this being the biggest test for internet companies and its sub-sector, social media. Also we will get to see their real numbers but at the end this wont matter, this offering is like the testing of "to be or not to be". I will bet for TO BE. I am interested in the pricing, hopefully above $40, never below $20 and most probably it will open 100% at least up and it most probably will close on the first day of trading 100% up the opening price, yes 200% up in total. I would definitively sell all my Groupon, Pandora and 1/2 of my LinkedIn stock and place it on Facebook (if I had those).

Growth potential is on the advertisement space and judging from Google aggressiveness during the last 6 months to improve g+, they must be really seeing the lost of advertisers, specially small ones to Facebook. I personally did a Facebook Ad campaign and a Google one, the Facebook one brought me 380 friends and 40 direct contacts and Google brought me none!!! On Facebook I could direct my campaign much more easier and bottom line I still do not understand who or where or when or nothing about the Google one.

Still to discuss it the assertiveness of Mark Zukenberg to treat the street but for sure he will manage,  I have a distorted image of him due to the social network movie and an interview with President Bush in which I was not particularly impressed. We wiil live to see this one and the thought of it makes me believe in Wall Street despite all.

S&P 500 Eminis Futures - 2011 Recap [Spanish]