The Facebook I.P.O. has left a lot of egg on faces around Wall Street.
Let us count some of the losers, reputation-wise, ranked from top to bottom.
2. Morgan Stanley. It seems to have badly overestimated how much actual demand for the stock there was, as opposed to demand for shares from people who hoped merely to flip them immediately for a quick profit. As lead underwriter, it was Morgan Stanley’s job to analyze the market, and it appears $38 per share was a price too far. It remains to be seen how much of the underwriters’ fees were squandered supporting the price on Friday. Could it be that Morgan lost money on the most coveted assignment of the year?
3. Nasdaq. The fact that it seems to have lost a lot of orders is unforgivable. The fact that some did not know for hours if their orders had been executed is even worse.
4. Facebook. It did get what was obviously top dollar, but at the cost of leaving many of its fans with a bad taste in their mouths, not to mention losses on their investments.
5. Wall Street. In 2004, when Google went public, it used a reverse auction to let anyone get shares. You just had to submit a bid to pay more than the lowest price necessary to sell all the shares. Wall Street firms were underwriters, but they no longer had the power to steer hot shares to favored customers. That was a threat to the Street’s conventional ways of doing business, and the fact that Google shares leaped to $100 from an offering price of $85 on the first day made it look as if the company had left money on the table. There were suspicions at the time — with no direct evidence — that the underwriting firms might have been pleased with the outcome because it would show other companies that reverse auctions were not the way to go. In any case, such auctions did not catch on. Now Facebook has gone a much more traditional route, with unhappy results.
To defend Morgan Stanley, it is fair to note that Facebook went public in the face of a market roiled by European worries. It also went public to the most hostile publicity for a major initial public offering that I can recall.
Remember the good old days of 1999, when everyone thought you were lucky to get in on a big I.P.O.? Now the conventional wisdom, at least in some circles, was that the buyers were fools.
On Thursday, the comedian Andy Borowitz published an obviously made-up “Letter from Mark Zuckerberg,” Facebook’s founder and chief executive. It began:
Dear Potential Investor:
For years, you’ve wasted your time on Facebook. Now here’s your chance to waste your money on it, too.
Tomorrow is Facebook’s IPO, and I know what some of you are thinking. How will Facebook be any different from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000’s?
For one thing, those bad dot-com stocks were all speculation and hype, and weren’t based on real businesses. Facebook, on the other hand, is based on a solid foundation of angry birds and imaginary sheep.
On Friday, The New York Post ran a front-page article reporting that the Facebook shares were priced at $38. The headline, in huge type, was “Zuckered.”
The article began:
“Thanks, chumps.”
By midafternoon that day, the news was not how rich Mark Zuckerberg was, but how badly bungled the offering had been.
After a weekend of dissection of the state of the offering, Monday’s trading did nothing to make anyone look better — or the I.P.O. buyers look less like suckers. The shares opened at 9:30 a.m. at $36.53. The shares were at $35 within three minutes, and hit the day’s low of $33 at 9:53 a.m. They closed at $34.03.
Google turned out to be a great investment. Maybe Facebook will turn out the same way. But right now, those who bought are the subject of scorn from their friends. It is not a good way to begin life as a public company.
An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly at one point to the company that has gone a more traditional route on its initial public offering. It is Facebook, not Google.