Today the market on Facebook shares opened at $32.91, even lower than yesterday’s $34 closing price, but as trading got underway, the trend still favored the downward spiral. As I write this article, Facebook is trading at almost 18% below the targeted $38 per share price. For about $31 you can own a piece of social networking history.
Though Facebook stock enjoyed a momentary spike at $45 per share on opening day, the IPO has been paged by less than stellar performance and has been favoring a downward trading price since Friday’s close. But Facebook is still one of the most active stocks on the market today. Tuesday alone saw over 28 million shares traded. While demand isn’t overwhelming, as many expected, there is still a significant demand.
There are a few factors that play into investors conservative opinions regarding Facebook shares, and at the heart of those concerns is a reduced revenue forecast from Morgan Stanley, the biggest underwriter of the deal. According to their most recent forecast, Facebook will suffer greatly from their huge surge in mobile users.
But many experts in the industry did see this less then stellar performance coming for Facebook. While some were leery about Facebook being valued higher than 99% of the current S&P 500 index, others warned that the IPO should be delayed because of market volatility and just simply, too many changes happening at Facebook all at once.
Overall there has not been much faith in Facebook’s $105 billion valuation. I don’t think you can expect the company to return very much to its shareholders if it is already grossly overvalued at the time of the public offering. Only time will tell if Facebook can rise above the challenges that lay before them, but right now, investors don’t want failure to be at their expense.
