Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Media frenzy on Google IPO

964 news articles speculating on Google's IPO and counting. Isn't this a bit much?

Update: Google has announced their IPO. Interesting that they're using a non-traditional auction designed to allow the general public access to the IPO shares. This method should be better for almost everyone by generating a real market in the IPO shares instead of the more traditional technique of allocating the IPO shares to insiders.

Update: Excellent quote from Lawrence Ausubel from U of Maryland on the Google IPO dutch auction (from a NYT article).
    You should be relatively indifferent about winning or losing the I.P.O. auction, because if Google does what you expect and selects the I.P.O. price to be the true clearing price, you will have the option to buy at essentially the same price the next day.
Exactly right. The traditional method of pricing IPO shares underprices the shares, so investors are not indifferent to acquiring the IPO shares. If the shares are correctly priced, you shouldn't care if you get the shares at IPO or a few days afterwards.