Seeking Alpha by Adding Beta

Finally Facebook's IPO is here. One of the most hyped IPO (and it deserves all the hype it received) is finally here valuing Facebook at around $104 Billion - more than Cisco or Amazon as standalone or Dell/HP combined. Only time would tell if Facebook as company can grow into this valuation or is this top of its valuation! I am sure tomorrow's trading would be all about FB. I won't be surprised to see it pop over $50 at open. Interesting as I have predicted sometime back, savvy investors were taking profits out from Apple for investing in Facebook. Is it coincidental that Apple lost almost $100 Billion valuation from it's high - almost exactly same as Facebook valuation! After all stock market is all about capital moving from one company to another company. In late 1990s Yahoo/Ebay/Amzn/CSCO/MSFT were dominating stock market valuations. All the valuation moved to Google/Apple and now Facebook. It's just matter of time when capital moves from these companies to som

It's becoming too predictable - first 3 to 4 months of new year economy start looking up and along the way stock markets across the world go up. Then comes April and economic recovery starts faltering and investors start following "Sell in May and walk away" advise. Then comes "same old same old" stories from Europe. Somewhere in the middle some bank loses couple of billion dollars in few days. It happened in 2010 and 2011 and it's again happening in 2012. When are we going to get out of this pattern? Last week was interesting week across multiple fronts. Let's look at them and see if we can predict how events would turn out next week: French election results were predictable - so no real reaction Election results from Greece were un-predictable. Could this be catalyst for finally Greece leaving Europe. If Greeks are hell-bent in electing radical left, they better start preparing life without Euro . Left leader Tsipras is playing dangerous game of

Traditionally First weekend of May is start of summer movies and this time it started with a bang with Avengers breaking all records and becoming first ever movie to cross $200M mark for one Friday to Sunday collections @ Boxoffice. It broke the record by over $31 million held by last installment of Harry Potter. Myself, Yash and Guts saw it yesterday and looking at crowds, it was very apparent that this was going to break records. Regarding movie, for an action film, it was good. Main star was of course Robert Downy (aka Ironman). It would be interesting to see if Chris Nolan directed last Batman movie (which opens in mid-July) breaks this record! May is also start of another round of European roller-coaster. With two key elections wrapping up today, most likely direction of European policy would change. France is becoming socialist and Greeks are venting their anger on two main parties. It would not be surprising if Greeks had to face another election later this year. Would May 6,