Digital Stocks' YTD Performance: Meh (Stay Private, Mark!)

March 4, 2010 at 1:32 am PT

In a Wall Street Journal article today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as not particularly eager to take his social networking phenom public.

That has pretty much been his well-known attitude for a long time now–which has occasionally put him at odds with others–due to a range of issues, from the company not being ready for prime-time to Zuckerberg’s likely distaste for having Wall Street investors second-guess him.

His ability to stay private and avoid an IPO–at least for the short term–was, in fact, sealed by a recent giant funding the company received from a Russian investment firm.

And looking at the stock performance of four big digital companies so far this year, there has not been much upside yet for Facebook to jump into.

For the year to date:

Yahoo (YHOO) shares are down 7.2 percent.

Apple (AAPL) stock, normally a fizzy one, is down .67 percent.

Google (GOOG) shares have dipped 12 percent.

And Microsoft (MSFT) is down 6.6 percent.

You get the idea, but here’s the chart, below:

Tagged with: Apple, digital, Facebook, financial, Google, Internet, investor, IPO, Kara Swisher, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft, performance, private, public, Russian, social networking, Wall Street, Yahoo, YTD

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Anonymous

Putting all os those stockes in the same basket is pretty lazy analysis.
markmay

Hi Kara – I respectfully disagree w/ your suggestion that 1) the YTD performance of these three tech stocks is a guidepost for timing Facebook's IPO and that 2) Zuck would be wise to wait, for three main reasons: 1) Facebook is a far more interesting growth story that any of these four companies, except arguably GOOG and AAPL (and GOOG's YTD performance is largely company specific around regulatory-related issues); and 2) recall that GOOG went public in Aug '04 at a time when the NASDAQ had declined >8% YTD (the NASDAQ is flat YTD); and, 3) if Facebook wants to be different and do the right thing, they (like GOOG) will go public not at the height of the market (making investors pay top multiples) but in the middle of the cycle – creating a long-term win-win for investors, employees and Mark himself. Just my humble opinion…