All right, all right. I'll say a few words on LNKD's insane public debut today. This is off the top of my head, and I feel guilty even piling on about this company on which I wish there'd be a moratorium placed with respect to news articles….
In no particular order:
(1) This is bound to heat up interest in the likes of SecondMarket, since – against all probabilities – those who got into the stock before today made out like bandits.
(2) The chatter out there is that every social networking firm would like to go public Approximately By Tomorrow since the appetite for this is clearly so rampant. After all, why wait nearly a year (ahem – Facebook?) when you have no idea what the next year will bring?
(3) If I were Reid Hoffman (and I'm not – – since I'm about one hundred pounds lighter and $1.9 billion dollars poorer) I would have wished for, say, a 5% gentle rise in price today. Unless this stock pushes merrily higher and higher and remains in the triple digits, it won't be long before he has a lot of pissed-off public owners. Let's keep in mind this thing was priced at $45 last night. What if it returned to $45 in three months? That's going to make for a lot of very underwater holders.
(4) I can already tell that people have a serious case of 1999 on the brain all over again, and I'm aghast at how many prominent commentators are saying – without a hint of irony – that It's Different This Time.
(5) Something in the back of my head is telling me the bear market can't seriously get rocking and rolling again until Social Networking Mania is over and done with. Sadly, that won't be the case until Facebook comes public, and present talk is that such an event is nearly a year away. Grumble. Well, we'll just have to take things one day at a time, yes?