Old School Investors wary of Google IPO

Not everyone is caught up in the hype.

[grelmar]

AP Article available at Findlaw dot com [fsnews.findlaw.com]

Ok, before anyone pounces on me, let me just state the following:

I like Google. I like their search engine. I think they have a wonderful corporate culture (doing things like requiring their programmers to spend 20% of their time on "personnal projects" and such).

I may have on again, off again feelings about GMail, but overall, I like google.

I've just been leary of their IPO and the whole Dutch Auction system from the beginning. I'm leary about opening up the IPO sale to the public, because that could conceivably (read: most likely will) inflate the IPO price when less-than-informed investors caught up in the hype start bidding too high. And there are actually a lot of other reasons why I'm leary of the offering.

I could be totally wrong. But in the end, for me, it's a whole risk vs. reward calculation. I don't like the math.

But don't take my word for it. I'm just an anonymous alias ranting on a public message board. Go read the AP article, do some serious research, THEN decide what you wanna do with your money.

Be wary of hype. Hype and the stock market are a combustible mix.

[Freedom]

IF investors gets caught up in the hype without doing due dilligence and then lose a lot of money, that's their fault.

Nobody cares.

[loanuniverse]

Well there were a couple of comments in the article that I did not like.

If they stub their toe in one quarter, the multiple drops drastically

This should have been increases instead of drops.

"It's a great story and a great product. But $135 a share?

IMHO, it is not the value of the share, but the PE that is the big story. If you are going to complain, complain about the high PE. Value per share as long as we don’t cross the $1,000 a share threshold is not that important.

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Regarding your comment about the Dutch auction bringing in unsuspecting, unprepared investors, I agree. However, IPO have been known to already bring unsuspecting, unprepared investors.

Personally, I would have been happier if I could have gotten in at around Yahoo’s PE. As it stands the pricing could easily result on twice that number. This might cause me to either not invest or cutting back on the amount of dollars to invest.

I agree that it all comes down to each person’s aversion to risk and also to their ability to understand the company, the industry, the market and the financial information.

[nate_king1]

I'm not caught up in this hype. Wait for the end of August you will see that the price will fall. I'm diffenitly staying on of the whole thing for at least August. Maybe when the shares fall to $30 or $40 I'll take a stake only after the Lawsuit between Overture - Goolge - FindWhat is over, and Google wins.(But it won't happen).