Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Still Below Offering Price, but Facebook Stock Got a 10 Percent Boost This Week

For those keeping track — and there are many, as the investigations and recriminations into its borked IPO continue — the shares of Facebook moved strongly upward this week.

The stock of the social networking site closed at $33.05 on Friday, up almost 4 percent. For the week, the shares rose 10 percent.

There could be a number of reasons for the gains, including progress on its long-expected advertising network with an appearance on Zynga this week.

Zynga — whose stock has been closely aligned with Facebook’s due to its strong partnership — was also up this week by close to 5 percent.

Still, the online gaming company’s shares are down almost 37 percent since its IPO in December. And Facebook’s stock is still 13 percent below its public offering price in May, when it debuted at a hefty $38 per share.

But the latest prices are better than the lows of about $25.50 that the Silicon Valley company has traded at so far in its very short public life.

The company is now worth almost $71 billion, which is one-third lower than its much-hyped $100 billion valuation.

The next real signals for investors will be when Facebook releases its second-quarter earnings sometime in late July — which might give clues to how it is handling its advertising challenges, including in mobile.

But there is still no news of when that will be on Facebook’s spartan investor relations Web page.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”