Google Ipo, Announcement Next Week? Options

[OldWelshGuy]

Looks like Google are about to announce their IPO.

Forbes link

OWG

[Steve Sardell]

If and when it does come about--as soon as allowed short the stock

[OldWelshGuy]

Good strategy Steve

[AussieWebmaster]

I actually see it making a quick climb to 50 or 75% over opening price and then falling below it slowly... or after six months when many of the employees can divest.... that will be a date when the stock falls out of bed.

[Steve Sardell]

Aussieweb,,
I agree re the initial climb, in fact, an initial 100% jump would not surprise me. There has been so much HYPE. Initialy expectations were to raise 12-16 B now some are predicting as much as 25B. After the hype and the *I just gotta have this stock* have worn thin I would expect it to fall below the opening day price. Of course this is JMHO.

Much of the hype can be accredited to the Yahoo! emergence and its earnings and now even Ask Jeeves has posted great reports http://www.hoovers.com/free/news/detail.xh...a3d0007da4531a5 There has even been some talk about AOL revamping Netscape and bringing it back into the frey. As long as the SEs stay in the print and airways it bodes well for the G opening. But, I would not touch it with a pole.

[Randy]

I'm with you Steve, as I posted somewhere around here months ago. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/lol.gif)

a-shorting we shall go, a-shorting we shall go, hi-ho the merry-o, a shorting we shall go. Gotta pay for the daughter's college yanno. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Kackle]

Ten reasons why you should drop everything and go to your bank, withdraw all the money you've saved for Google stock, go home and stuff it under your mattress, and sit on it !

1. There are thousands of geeky cultists who worship everything Google, and cannot wait to buy some shares. None of them has ever criticized Google for anything over the last five years. If average investors get a chance to buy in at a reasonable price, these geeks will quickly inflate the price beyond all reason.

2. Google is a self-contained little world in Silicon Valley. Their public relations department exhibits all the survival skills of a two-year-old wandering alone in the jungle. When push comes to shove, they cry rather well, or throw a tantrum, or they have no comment. That's all they can do because they know little about the big world out there, which is full of social issues that cannot be reduced to mathematical algorithms.

3. Google owns thousands of cheap computers, and has produced software that ties them together in a vast distributed network. However, the barrier to entry for a new search engine is not that high these days. Hardware is still dropping in price, and in coming years the software for distributed computing on Linux boxes will be more generally available.

4. Yahoo is trying too hard to monetize their new search engine, but apart from this they've already shown that their technology is as good as Google's. No longer is there anything special about Google's secret sauce, if there ever was. PageRank, for example, is not even important to Google's engineers these days.

5. Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?

6. Google's ad revenue is very impressive. By the end of May 2004, they will stop showing gambling ads and rogue pharmacy ads, for legal reasons. What percentage of their ad revenue comes from these two categories? We don't know, and Google isn't likely to tell us.

7. Everyone agrees that Google's search excellence, as defined by the quality of the results for search terms that produce links to commercial sites, has fallen considerably over the last twelve months.

8. Geek buzz says that "personalized search" is the Next Big Thing. The more an engine knows about you, the better it can guess what you consider to be relevant, and the more it can charge advertisers. Look at Google's competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?

9. Google is ruled by a triumvirate -- Larry, Sergey, and Eric. These three are very good at being geeks, and not good at much else. Meanwhile, venture capitalists on the board of directors want to get their money back from their Google investment. Into this mixture, add the suspicious hype from Wall Street over Google's impending IPO.

10. You can bring your dog to work, you get free gourmet lunches, and Google offers an on-site doctor and dentist, massage and yoga, and on-site day care. They have a fleet of Segway scooters ($5000 each). Meanwhile, behind the big colored balls and bean bags, half of the workers are low-level contractors with access to none of this. Google's motto is "Don't be evil."

Does this in$pire confidence?

[Randy]

As a follow up to OWG's original link, here's a Bloomberg News article from today.

Google Inc., which runs the world's most popular Internet search engine, has picked Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley to lead an initial public share offering that may be announced this week, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

[Randy]

And an Associated Press article on the potential downsides of going public.

An IPO "can create more accountability, but it doesn't necessarily foster long-term value," said Peter Thiel, who took his Internet startup, PayPal, public in 2002 before selling the company to eBay for $1.3 billion. "(It) changes the emphasis from building a great business to trying to meet the quarterly (earnings) numbers."

This is one of the few published articles that actually touches on the Why Now? discussion. Simply stated, the answer is that Google an income level and enough shareholders that they would be required to do all of the public filings even if they were still a "privately held" company. If you have to do the filings, you might as well take the cash of going public.

[ghergich]

Any news on how we little people can buy some of this stock or will google be "evil" and take a pass on the individual invester. I heard talk of them doing something online but that seems to have faded now.

[Steve Sardell]

Hi Ghergich

Yes, there was some early talk about making the stock available to the masses and even discussion for a Dutch Auction, but now it appears Google will be taking the more traditional IPO route. If they do use CSFB a/o MS the chance of the everyday person, unless one has a super broker, picking up shares at the first offering is slim.

[ghergich]

great (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif)

[arman]

Rule of thumb for sound investing.

1 Never ever buy highly touted stock. Exp PALM

2 Never ever buy hyped stock on first day. Exp PALM opened at $182 on first day and never recovered.


3 IMO since average investor can't short the stock on first day your money will be safe under the mattress.

4 check the total size of the float Vs offered chances are all this greedy insider and capital investment firm will be first to cash in as soon is restriction on insider will expire. typically 180 days.

5 Quick way to make money is get in early in the stock of the company who holds 5% or more in hyped stock. In google case yahoo owns the certain percentage. so expect to see yahoo climb slowly till Google IPO comes out. Exp. COMS went from 30 to 100 when PALM IPO started trading.

Disclaimer: This is my opinion only and not to be consider advise. Do your own due diligence.

[arman]

"Google, in its prospectus, said it faces "significant competition" from those two rivals, as well as from traditional media companies. It said it expected that its growth rates will decline and margins will narrow"

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/040429/tech_google_21.html

(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/omg.gif)

[Rob]

and has now filed ... (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.ph...wtopic=5943&hl=