yiah notes...

Well, just think of it this way… Let’s assume you own a very expensive piece of waterfront real estate, and you hire a broker to sell it for you. After exploring the market and after getting indications of interest, your broker advises you that $10 million would be a great price for your home.  You meet with the potential buyers and decide to sell it for $10 million.  After the $1 million commission you have to pay your broker, your net proceeds are $9 million. An hour later, you drive by the house and see your broker in the driveway shaking hands with some different people. You pull over to see what’s going on, and you find that the people you just sold the house to for $10 million are very close friends of your broker.  To your dismay, you also find out that those friends just sold your (former) house to somebody else for $15 million.

The same exact game is going on here, Mark. You’ll be selling 388 million shares of Facebook stock in your IPO. A likely scenario is that your broker “friends” are telling you to sell your shares at $40 per share. You’ll take their advice and sell at $40 per share, and the buyers will be Morgan Stanley’s biggest fund management clients. By the time you drive around the block, these folks will have sold their shares at $50 per share. In other words, using the same real estate scenario, you’ll have sold something of yours for $15 billion that is really worth $19 billion. And for that “unique” privilege, you’ll be paying your “friends” at the banks $150 million as a fee.

Why did Zynga’s stock drop when Facebook went public?

Zynga went through its own private flash crash. The straight drop and rise and drop in its stock after Facebook’s IPO is the classic signature of program trading. Whatever algorithms traders were using agreed that the stock was hugely overvalued, then undervalued, then overvalued again. So they all screamed “SELL” or “BUY” at the same time. 

Then they stopped. Trading resumed at a more human pace. Why the change? One plausible explanation is that traders unloaded Zynga stock because now they could buy Facebook stock. They did so en masse — until Zynga stock fell so far that it became too cheap to resist. Then they bought it en masse — until Zynga stock rose so far that it became too expensive to resist dumping. 

(Source: soupsoup)