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To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (593)5/22/2012 7:00:46 PM
From: Lahcim Leinad  Respond to of 3790
 
During the Wild West late 90's, Blodget was The Most Prominent tech analysts for Merrill Lynch, who pounded the table it wasn't a bubble at the very tippy top, and everything .com was going to the stars.

He was dead wrong then, and has been continuously, since then.

Good GOD we made GOBS of money off him here on SI back then, going the exact opposite way.

Shorting him is probably still a wise strategy. Haven't checked lately, but I bet it is, to this day.

BTW, back then he even made it into one of the funniest April Fools gags ever pulled on SI, namely FunPhone.com. When it went "belly up" Henri Blojet made the news with, "The last nail in our corporate coffin was the recent downgrade by Wall Street analyst Henri Blojet, from Mega-Cosmic Giganto Super-Neat Idea to Totally-Stinky Money-Sucking Nightmare. That hurt us. When Henri finally wakes up and downgrades a deal, you know it's over."
_____

FunPhone.com regrets to announce that it has ceased all production of fun, effective immediately.

We have restructured our operations in a way that will make us quite lean and very mean. A few random calls will be connected manually by cheap labor in the Phillipines, but most of our customers will hear nothing at all when they use our service. The company hopes to generate additional revenue by selling the name, address and phone number of everyone who has ever visited the site to I-Want-Spam.com.

As the company transitions to a post-salary situation, we are confident our many ex-employees will soon find other work in the telecommunications sector, possibly searching for change in public telephones. The Marketing Department has already been welcomed back by the perfume counter at Macy's.

About FunPhone: FunPhone.com is a leading provider of internet-enabled cyber-gag solutions. Its headquarters building has won international recognition as a leading-edge place to work in the places-to-work space. It features ceramic office furniture by noted Italian designer Gianni Fiasco, with chairs so leading-edge that employees would do all their work in the bathrooms, and return to their desks only to relieve themselves and consume narcotics. The office also includes a basketball court, olympic-size swimming pool and a live heavy metal band eight hours a day, and was voted one of the "10 Best Places to Goof Off" by Slacker Magazine.

CEO Nigel Bruce stated, "We don't think our business model was flawed, it's just that no-one wants to pay for free stuff on the internet any more. We're in a bear market for fun right now. Naturally, none of what happened to FunPhone.com is our fault. We are the victims here.

"The last nail in our corporate coffin was the recent downgrade by Wall Street analyst Henri Blojet, from Mega-Cosmic Giganto Super-Neat Idea to Totally-Stinky Money-Sucking Nightmare. That hurt us. When Henri finally wakes up and downgrades a deal, you know it's over. But our current dire situation is the fault of our venture capital backers, Big Pile O' Money IX L.P. It's their fault for giving us all that money in the first place! Damn them! When we had too much, they would just tell us to spend more, but now that it's all gone, we really do need more, but they won't give it to us! Damn them and their Boxsters, their private jets and their clean underwear! Damn them!"

"We're just going to hunker down and wait it out, hoping for the next wave of easy money and naïve optimism, when the goatee is once again the universal symbol of business and technical acumen, it's impossible to park downtown, and you sound smart if you add words like space and going forward to every sentence."

Added Bruce, "Our strategy going forward is to be a leader in the dead dot-com space. It's just like death in the real life space, it's not the end of the world or anything. We'll bounce back, going forward."

This page sponsored by the Margin Desk at Goldworth Grynch. "It's Our Money Now!"

___



To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (593)5/22/2012 7:36:28 PM
From: zax  Respond to of 3790
 


May 22, 2012, 6:37 pm
Facebook I.P.O. Raises Regulatory Concerns
By EVELYN M. RUSLI and MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

dealbook.nytimes.com

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters Facebook on the NASDAQ Marketsite.
Just days before Facebook went public, some big investors got nervous about the social network.

After publicly warning about challenges in mobile advertising, Facebook executives held conference calls to update their banks’ analysts on the business. Armed with the new information, analysts at Morgan Stanley and other firms started reaching out to their clients to dial back expectations for the Internet company.

One prospective investor was told that second-quarter revenue could be 5 percent lower than the bank’s earlier estimates. Another analyst warned that revenue could be light for the next two years.

As investors tried to digest the developments, Morgan Stanley was busy setting the price and the size of the I.P.O.

While some big institutions chose not to buy the stock, others placed large orders. And retail investors, who weren’t necessarily privy to the same information, continued to clamor for shares.

John Tlumacki/Boston GlobeWilliam Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of state.
In the end, Morgan Stanley bankers decided they had enough demand and interest for Facebook to justify an offering price of $38 a share.

They didn’t.

When Facebook went public on May 18, shares of the social networking company barely budged — and they have been falling every since. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $31, more than 18 percent below its offering price.

The I.P.O. of Facebook was supposed to be Morgan Stanley’s crowning achievement. The bank had helped usher in a new era of technology companies, leading the offerings of LinkedIn, Groupon, Pandora and more than a dozen other start-ups over the past year.

Facebook was poised to be the biggest and most ambitious. When the dust settles, Morgan Stanley could make more than $100 million on the I.P.O.

But Morgan Stanley may have given the market more than it can chew. Rival bankers and big investors have complained that Morgan Stanley botched the I.P.O., setting the price too high and selling too many shares to the public.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, Morgan Stanley said that it followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering as it does for all I.P.O.’s

Facebook’s fate as a public company is hardly sealed. Many newly public companies stumble out of the gate and later become top performing stocks, including Amazon.com.

But Facebook’s troubled debut raises questions about the I.P.O. process.

Regulators are concerned, in part, that banks may have shared information with certain clients, rather than broadly with investors. On Tuesday, William Galvin, Massachusetts’ secretary of state, subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over discussions with investors about Facebook’s I.P.O. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self regulator, is also looking into the matter.

“If true, the allegations are a matter of regulatory concern to Finra” and the Securities and Exchange Commision, Richard G. Ketchum, the chief executive of Finra said in a statement.

Morgan Stanley said in its statement:

After Facebook released a revised S-1 filing on May 9 providing additional guidance with respect to business trends, a copy of the amendment was forwarded to all of Morgan Stanley’s institutional and retail investors and the amendment was widely publicized in the press at the time. In response to the information about business trends, a significant number of research analysts in the syndicate who were participating in investor education reduced their earnings views to reflect their estimate of the impact of the new information. These revised views were taken into account in the pricing of the I.P.O.




To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (593)5/22/2012 8:10:27 PM
From: Win-Lose-Draw  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 3790
 
There is much irony in this piece coming from Blodgett.



To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (593)5/22/2012 11:10:43 PM
From: puborectalis  Respond to of 3790
 
businessinsider.com



To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (593)5/22/2012 11:55:27 PM
From: Kirk ©  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 3790
 
RE: "One of the underwriter's analysts has said he was told by a Facebook financial executive to cut his estimates.

According to another source with insight into the Facebook IPO process, until the underwriters' analysts cut their estimates, demand for Facebook's stock among sophisticated institutional investors was high. Once these investors heard about the estimate cut, however, they became more cautious about the IPO."


Blodget... wasn't he hammered by the SEC for fraud and banned from managing money for life?




Yup.,.... en.wikipedia.org

Fraud allegation and settlement In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published. [4] In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. [5] He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement. [6]