By Helix Investment Management:

The hype surrounding the Facebook (FB) IPO resembled something seen in the heyday of the dot-com era, with the fervor reaching a fever pitch on Thursday, May 17, the day before Facebook started trading on the NASDAQ. The IPO was priced almost perfectly, as the stock did not see a huge pop, meaning that the underwriters did not underprice it, thus leaving money on the table for the company. However, the stock almost fell through the $38 IPO price, and the underwriters were forced to step in and defend the stock.

With the IPO now complete, investors can begin to look at Facebook and value it just like any other company. That is what we aim to do in this article. We will be comparing Facebook to several of its peers to see if a case can be made for investing in the stock. We chose 3 peers in the

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By Value in Stock Market:

Earlier, I wrote that Facebook’s (FB) IPO is becoming a sucker’s bet. On its IPO debut, Facebook started at $42, hit a high of $45 for a brief moment, and then turned south quickly. It hovered around the round number psychological price of $40, and went directly to $38 at approximately 11:50 EDT. $38, Facebook’s official IPO price, provides the second psychological barrier that sustained through the day. Its price bounced back from there and stay above $38 for most of the rest of the day. The fact that $38 has been hit multiple times during the day makes it a very ugly IPO.

Once $38 is penetrated, the bottom for Facebook’s stock price can be pretty deep.

By midday, many Facebook related plays went down in sympathy: Zynga (ZNGA) was down 13.3% and its trade was halted. Renren (RENN), the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, was down 9.4%. GSV Capital

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By Steven Vincent:

Let me start by clarifying something. I am not saying that the market could crash spectacularly in the next few days and that in that event the Facebook (FB) IPO would be a major contributing factor. I am not saying that. The market is saying it.

Facebook boosts IPO size by 25 percent, could top $16 billion

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc increased the size of its initial public offering by almost 25 percent, and could raise as much as $16 billion as strong investor demand for a share of the No.1 social network trumps debate about its long-term potential to make money. Facebook, founded eight years ago by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room, said on Wednesday it will add about 84 million shares to its IPO, floating about 421 million shares in an offering expected to be priced on Thursday.

This mammoth dumping of shares

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By Chuck Carnevale:

There is a confluence of factors that are painting a very odd picture of current investor behavior. Common sense and a careful analysis of the market dynamics between equities and bonds today would indicate that investors should be acting in the exact opposite manner than they are. Interest rates are hovering at a 100-year low, which creates two problems for investors. First, there is not enough return from bonds to fund a retiree’s income needs or to fight inflation. Second, investing in bonds with interest rates so low makes it riskier to own bonds today than it has been in over a century.

Conversely, many U.S. equities, especially blue-chip dividend paying equities with long histories of paying and increasing their dividends are at historically low valuations, and therefore, offering historically above-average current yields. Furthermore, high-quality blue-chip U.S. corporations are perhaps in better financial health than we’ve seen in decades. Consequently,

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By Sami J. Karam:

Expectations of a robust housing recovery are not well supported by US demographics.

From Bloomberg News (February 8, 2012): Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told investors and analysts in a January conference call that housing is “getting closer” to a bottom. “We’re going to add 3 million Americans every year for the next 10 years. That’s 30 million Americans who need 13 million dwellings,” he said.

Mr. Dimon’s estimate looks too optimistic on two accounts. First, the US population will more likely grow by 23 to 26 million in the next 10 years. And second, the demographic bracket which includes over 80% of home buyers will grow at a much lower rate.

The US population grew by 2.8 million people in the sixteen months from April 2010 to July 2011, but over 700,000 of these 2.8 million were new immigrants. In the remainder of this decade, the population will grow

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By Helix Investment Management:

Of all the companies we cover, none provides as much drama as Clearwire (CLWR). The wireless company is constantly in the news for some sort of reason, and the attention it receives in the press often manifests itself in the company’s stock price. In the past 2 weeks or so, however, there has been a dearth of news about Clearwire, either from the company, or the press. And yet, the stock has steadily dropped since the start of May, falling almost 22%, compared to a drop of just over 5% from the S&P 500 (SPY). What we find more noteworthy about this drop is that it did not occur during one day, on the back of some headline or rumor. Rather, it has occurred gradually, with the stock reaching a new 52-week low of $1.06 on Wednesday, May 16, before recovering to close at $1.14.

(click to enlarge)Our <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article

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By Dana Blankenhorn:

Seeking Alpha readers obsess over Apple (AAPL) and perhaps rightly so.

Writing about Apple here is, in fact, the easiest dollar one can make. So easy that the editors recently restricted us all to three Apple stories per month. It’s like regulating an oil well’s flow so it won’t play out prematurely.

So as the Facebook (FB) IPO approaches let’s talk about the Apple obsession.

Part of it is a simple disconnect between expected and actual valuation caused by the law of large numbers. At its current price of $553/share, AAPL trades at a PE multiple of just 13.5. That’s well below the S&P’s average PE of 17, far below 18.5, and nothing next to Amazon’s (AMZN) “redonkulous” PE of 184.

Unfair, say Apple fanboys.

But consider this. Apple had $108 billion in revenue last year. It brought almost a quarter of that to the bottom line. Like athletes, stocks

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By Herr Hansa
:

The desire to access information anywhere and anytime will be met with a variety of mobile devices, through the small screens of smartphones and the slightly larger to much larger screens of tablets. Netbooks and laptops may be the losers in this shift toward mobile. While many consider this an app-centric world — and I doubt apps will ever disappear — there is a growing move toward HTML5 and content optimized for smaller screens. As devices share some common aspects, like screen resolution, it will become less complicated to produce content that is easily accessible on smartphones and tablets.

Hints at smartphones coming into the market in late 2012 indicate a move toward a 720p HD screen (1280 x 720, or near that resolution) in a 4″ to 4.5″ diagonal for most devices. Some companies may stick to the current, one function at a time with fields of icons approach,

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By Martin Redfield:

Introduction

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) has provided a lot of fascinating action over the past six months. One aspect of the company that bears have been emphasizing is that in September 2012, the patents protecting GMCR’s K-Cup will expire, and the resulting competition will result in lower sales and margins. In his now-famous “GAAP-ucino” presentation, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, on slides titled “Competition Expected in September 2012″ and “The Reality of GMCR’s Patent Position,” stated:

- Both patents (patent 5,325,765 and patent 5,840,189) are set to expire

- Any aspect of the K-cup that was revealed in either patent falls into the public domain

- Competitors will be able to produce K-Cups

GMCR, on the other hand, paints a very different picture of the patent situation. Here is what they had to say in their 2011 annual report:

In the United States, patents associated with some of our

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By Value Equity Analyst:

To evaluate the risk/reward of owning the 2019 Series A and 2018 Series B Bank of America (BAC) warrants, I built a simple Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model, which allowed me to estimate the expected return profile of the warrants under various scenarios. While different investors have different risk tolerances, I believe that owning the stock outright offers far and away the best risk/reward profile (in excess of a 5:1 ratio of upside to downside pay-off). The report below is broken up into the following sections:

• Results
• Warrant Detail
• Methodology
• Assumptions
• Sensitivity

RESULTS–Just Go Long The Stock, Forget The Warrants

In the table below, I show my expected IRR in both my base case and my downside scenario across a range of holding periods for the stock, the Series A warrants, and the Series B warrants. For the stock, I calculate an expected return-to-downside ratio of 5.2x, this compares to 0.9x

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