Hacker News Reader

It's always obvious in hindsight.

If Facebook shares had tripled today, that would also have been obvious after the fact.

If Facebook triples on Monday, you will kick yourself for passing up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy at the IPO price of $38.

And if the Facebook debacle continues and craters the entire market, we will see that all the warning signs were there, if only we could have recognized them in advance.

While this is a nice theory in principle, I think it falls down because of the timing of the ZNGA drop. The drop happened exactly when the FB shares were made available to trade (11.30 - 11.38), before this time they had been trading fine (in big volumes). You would expect the people that were holding these shares as a proxy for FB to have anticipated that others like them would have wanted to sell that morning and done so before the moment arrived. In fact, there is evidence that this did happen in that there was big movement of ZNGA in the first hour of trading and at around 10.50.

This means that is was much more likely that it was down to bad trading algorithms. Or that is how I see it anyway...

If you were an ZNGA owner who's also interested in FB, you won't necessarily sell ZNGA before actually buying FB, because you don't actually know that you can get FB at a price acceptable to you until trading opens. In other words, human beings could contribute to the ZNGA price, not just trading algorithms.

Good point. But if you were a ZNGA owner who wanted to buy FB at a lower price than the expected one, you would know that as soon as the FB price was lower than expected, the ZNGA stock would slide (as everyone was using it as a proxy). Subsequently, unless you sold within 2 minutes of the FB price being known, it wouldn't be a good strategy (as you would end up loosing money on the ZNGA sell).

That said, as long as you acted fast enough, that strategy was win-win. Either FB stock was too high and ZNGA rose too, or FB was affordable and you could quickly change to that, before ZNGA fell.

I think hristov's theory holds up just fine. I think the initial drop was short sales by people anticipating that exact situation.

>"So a lot of Zynga shareholders were merely holding Zynga as a proxy for Facebook. Once Facebook was offered all those people decided to sell Zynga to buy Facebook. And Zynga tanked accordingly"

If people were holding ZNGA as a proxy for FB, with the intention to dump the shares for FB when it went public, then these people should have known that others would be doing the same. Thus, they should have started earlier. I think this theory explains the flash crash, but not the bigger picture.

>" The reason Facebook went down is the usual immediate post IPO sell-off when a bunch of people that got into the IPO sell their shares immediately to make some quick profit."

A stock transaction is a two-way street. There is a buyer on the other end of the deal, you don't sell shares into a vacuum. So, selling the shares doesn't drive down price, lack of demand does.

Hindsight bias:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/

interesting link.

>So a lot of Zynga shareholders were merely holding Zynga as a proxy for Facebook.

This might be a part of the reason. But the big huge fall, then the huge rise might just be triggered by silly trading algorithms, maybe?

Like you said, Zynga and Facebook are presumed to be highly correlated in terms of value. But, Zynga needs facebook more than the other way round. I think (and this may just be utterly wrong), that the steep fall in facebook's value triggered an even steeper fall in Zynga's share price, which then cascaded to panicked investors selling their shares to lower it even more.

The real funny thing however, is the steep rise again. I am tempted to venture a guess that everyone was watching the trades to see who would make the first move, and then piggyback on them.

Sort of like a room full of people with guns pointed at each other. No one really wants to make the first move, but as soon as someone does, the only chance of surviving would be to start shooting.

I subscribe to your hypothesis that people were trading Zynga as a proxy for Facebook. The fortunes of Zynga are highly dependent on Facebook, and when big daddy was going down today so was Zynga.

As for making money on this, no dealers had shares available to sell short this morning or the past few days I believe.

The reason Facebook went down is the usual immediate post IPO sell-off when a bunch of people that got into the IPO sell their shares immediately to make some quick profit.

Is this one correct, though? I recall that insiders have selling restrictions for 180 days after the IPO date.

Lock-up periods only apply to those holding a majority of stock (i.e., Zuckerberg), or to insiders who held a significant portion of stock prior to the filing of the IPO. Company employees typically fall into this category, too, even if their holdings aren't enormous, because they're insiders.

The lock-up doesn't necessarily apply to people who got in at the IPO, such as during the roadshow period. Also pretty sure the lock-up doesn't apply to people who bought private shares in secondary markets, such as the Goldman clients who bought in when Goldman offered private stock about 6 months ago.

I was an engineer at HomeAway during last year's IPO, and all employees were under a 6-month lockup period (during which time you can not sell stock, or enter into any sort of agreement with a third party regarding stock options).

As an employee, therefore, the IPO event itself is not too significant. Unless you have $1 options (or already own stock at a very favourable price), you can't bank on a return due to the uncertainty of the lockup period. Also, the end of the lockup period itself (although completely anticipated by the market) will likely be unfavourable for the stock price as selling employees introduce more supply.

Are you allowed to sell the market (S&P say, using a 6 months futures contract) so that your only exposure is to the Homeway-S&P differential, not to the market in general?

To further support my theory, I note that LinkedIn also fell today by 5.6%. This was not a fall as steep as that of Zynga, but of LinkedIn is not as closely intertwined with facebook as Zynga.

GOOG dropped by 3.6%, that's around $7.1B in market cap which is almost half of the entire Facebook offering - do you suppose this was driven by people who really wanted Facebook exposure, too?

A lot of tech stocks declined today, not just GOOG, though GOOG declined quite a lot. Even (Adobe) ADBE declined by 2.19%.

Possible explanation: If you were a big institutional fund manager with a large portfolio, would you put your money in thousands of small-cap companies or a few large-cap companies? When an opportunity like FB arises and you want to get in, what would be the easier way to get the liquidity needed to buy FB? If you don't have very sophisticated trading and portfolio management technology, one of the easiest ways to get the liquidity is to sell the large-caps first, and GOOG could be one of them.

Another possible explanation: GOOG and FB are perceived to be enemies/antagonistic. So, when one stock has a positive event (IPO that provides lots of liquidity), the other stock is impacted. This is a psychological explanation. I can't prove it.

I believe there is a similar reason for Google. I don't think that many people held Google as proxy for Facebook, but I am sure there are large funds that devote a certain percentage of their money for internet large cap stocks. Well, there aren't many internet large cap stocks, so Google held a large part of this money. When another internet large cap stock appears, the funds would sell some Google in order to get a proper exposure to Facebook. And thus Google falls.