Dividend Payments and the Facebook IPO Fizzles

My favorite natural gas position just paid me a dividend.

ETP paid me $9.53 (May 15, 2012) which I reinvested back to get 0.2065 shares at $46.15.

I really love dividends.

Just an update, XLNX's Ex-Dividend date was May 14, 2012.  Dividend date is on June 5, 2012.

Now for the news of the day...

Unless you've lived under a rock for the past few weeks, you would know that the Market has been tanking due to the reported European woes that focused on austerity measures and the possible Greek bank defaults.  

A lot of people may be worried and panicking while I am grinning from ear to ear because this massive sell-off may just give me another chance to buy more stocks for our stock portfolio.  It also inspired me to get more shares of my mutual funds for my Roth IRA.  Europe may be in trouble but as long as the USA does not collapse along with our European brothers and sisters, I'm very optimistic that this "bear" market is the second chance I've been praying for some time.

In other news, there's this small social networking company that went IPO today.  

Facebook (FB) was priced at $38/share and opened at $42.  The initial pop went up as high as $45 but that quickly dropped to just over $38.

Currently, FB is holding steady at $40-$41 (as of 11:41 am PST).  

My brother asked me if I'll buy FB today.  He even told me he can spare $10,000 to buy at the opening only to sell it at the end of the trading day.  I declined his offer and told him that I think FB was overpriced and that I do not invest in companies that does not show a positive cash flow (FB has yet to report their financials publicly... I'll check again later).  

With only an hour of trading left, I think I just saved my brother $10,000.  Can you imagine if I took his $10,000 and bought FB at the opening price of $42?  I would have lost him $476!  I guess I turned out to be a financial genius this time.  

Jim Cramer had warned his viewers to avoid FB in the after market (at the opening $42 valuation).  He also said that at $38, FB was way overpriced and that they should have kept the price at around $28-$30.  

Comparing FB to LinkedIn (LNKD).  LNKD opened at $45 and closed at $94.25.  LNKD outperformed FB's performance on IPO day.  There was even a time that LNKD was over $100 (Today, LNKD is at $100.18).  

What went wrong with Facebook?

Here a short video from the LA Times: 

I think the delay of the initial trading (I checked at 7am today and there was no info on any FB trading), high IPO price, GM pulling out of Facebook ads, Eduardo Saverin renouncing his US Citizenship to allegedly avoid taxes and the high amount of stocks being sold (trading volume) hurt Facebook (FB).  I guess the massive hype did not help FB and it probably disappointed a lot of investors.  I took a bet that the upside of getting the IPO will not make up for the downside of the IPO disappointing Wall Street.  I could not afford losing that much over a profit so insignificant the fees and taxes alone would eat it.  

This time, I was right. 

Automatic Investment Plan for May 1, 2012 Results

The Markets closed up today.  

The DOW Jones Average at 13,279.32 up 65.69 (+0.50%).

The NASDAQ is at 3,050.44 up 4.08 (+0.13%)

The S&P 500 is at 1,405.81 up 7.91 (+0.57%)

It is safe to say that my automatic savings plan purchase would be up a bit.  Here are the results of today's trading:

ETP   = 3.9240 shares @ $49.95

XLNX  = 2.6490 shares @ $36.24

WM    = 6.4473 shares @ $34.28

As you can see ETP was around $2 up from when I set-up the purchase.  Luckily, WM and XLNX were a few cents down which made up for the "pricier" ETP.

In other news, AAPL was down a lot today.  

I bet the stock is still reeling from the New York Times article that exposed how companies like Apple manage to avoid Billions of dollars in taxes by leveraging tax loopholes that primarily benefit huge corporations.  As you can imagine, public opinion on such practices have driven the stock price down.  However, I am not concerned for Apple.  If at all, I wish I had $1,000-$2,000 extra to buy more shares of Apple.  

To support my bullishness on Apple, here are some Apple news:

Apple just released and sold out tickets for their WWDC event in June and speculations are building up that the new iOS 6 software would be released at the event.  Let us also not forget that the Apple earnings call proved that sales of the new iPad, iPhones and Macs are strong.  So I expect Apple to take in more record breaking earnings numbers in the near future.