The valuation will be used to continue to reward employees, and in fact will be used a lot more frequently now that there is liquidity and the IPO is out of the way.
With high level share liquidity, insiders will find it easier to cash out and walk away from Facebook. Particularly those that have been there for a long time. The market has set a 'real' price on the shares, whereas the Second Market pre-IPO trading was a lot less liquid, and made it difficult to guess just what FB's real value was. Now employees know what their shares are really worth on a durable time frame.
The stock market is in a down swing, so there was little chance FB was going to see a healthy pop today. If you're building a long term business, all of the talk about it being up or down or popping today is literally irrelevant.
Groupon is specifically a great example of the investor con-game that goes on. They IPO'd a near historically small float (for a large company) to get as big a pop out of the stock as possible to punch the valuation high. Smoke and mirrors, and the stock proceeded to collapse 62% accordingly. It's a good sign that Facebook didn't pull any of that shit, and by all indications had a very sane and orderly IPO process.
If you're interested in the stock, give it time, you'll be able to get it under $30 / share in the next year.
With high level share liquidity, insiders will find it easier to cash out and walk away from Facebook. Particularly those that have been there for a long time. The market has set a 'real' price on the shares, whereas the Second Market pre-IPO trading was a lot less liquid, and made it difficult to guess just what FB's real value was. Now employees know what their shares are really worth on a durable time frame.
The stock market is in a down swing, so there was little chance FB was going to see a healthy pop today. If you're building a long term business, all of the talk about it being up or down or popping today is literally irrelevant.
Groupon is specifically a great example of the investor con-game that goes on. They IPO'd a near historically small float (for a large company) to get as big a pop out of the stock as possible to punch the valuation high. Smoke and mirrors, and the stock proceeded to collapse 62% accordingly. It's a good sign that Facebook didn't pull any of that shit, and by all indications had a very sane and orderly IPO process.
If you're interested in the stock, give it time, you'll be able to get it under $30 / share in the next year.