These days, it's very different. I have more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, and I'm being deluged with people who didn't get their orders filled, still don't know what they have, and aren't sure if they are long or short.
This deal, when the smoke clears, will go down as one of the worst-executed initial public offerings we have ever seen.
Now, I am sure that all of the firms involved will (1) disclaim any problems; (2) find a way to say it was the best offering ever; and (3) say that, given the demand and the volume, it was extremely well-handled.
Here's the issue, though: All of these people who are complaining can't be wrong. They didn't all make it up, and they aren't all complaining jerks. I guess we should just ignore them?
Look, someone blew the opening. Someone didn't have control over the deal. Someone was negligent. We just need to know what happened here.
You see, with these Twitter comments, I am not pointing fingers. The people are. The people can no longer be ignored just because they are little, or not JP Morgan, or because they are rich private clients of Goldman Sachs. Someone must answer to these people.But you know what? I am so jaded and cynical these days that I figure no one will. The process is hard enough, and the regulators are not sophisticated enough to do anything other than say, "Hey, it went pretty smoothly."
They will get away with that, because the press doesn't have subpoena power.
Now, on the deal itself, and why it was so sloppy, here's what I am hearing. Regardless of what the brokers were saying about demand, it was not tight at all. Regardless of what Facebook told Morgan Stanley, which amounted to something like, "Let the real people have it," the real people didn't expect it--that, or they didn't want it nearly as much as the Facebook gazillionaires thought they did.
There were plenty of brokers who couldn't fill the supply, not the demand. That's why I was so adamant on Meet the Press (video) that you need to be a seller. It was that, as well as the fact that all of these social media deals are busts, and the ones that don't stay at a premium to the deal are real busts.
In other words, given the lack of demand on the opening day, given the lack of faith and the anger that the IPO process engendered, and given the fact that Facebook is now just one more stock caught up in the fiasco that is Greece and the coming tragedy that is Spain, the stock's a sell, sell, sell.
Do you think any one of these underwriters can recommend it up here, given the metrics and the worries--yes, worries--about the next quarter? I don't think so.
Oh, and his weekend I almost clicked on a mobile ad by mistake because my eyes are getting bad.
I was saved at the last second by a fatter finger that directed it away. Phew!
Disclosures: At the time of publication, Cramer's charitable trust was long JPM.
