How does one value Facebook stock as a potential investment?
In the long term, a P/E of 15-25 is the more 'normal' range. With a 90 P/E, Facebook has to quadruple its earnings to get to normal. It this possible? Yes. Likely? I don't know.  I am not a stock analyst, but I love numbers and try to get to logical conclusions. I've seen data that worldwide advertising is about $400B, and US about $100B. If Facebook's profit runs 25% or so and I want a P/E of 20, it needs profit of $5B on sales of $20B (to reconcile its current $100B market cap). No matter what FB growth in sales is, the advertising spent worldwide will not rise or fall by much more than the economy. So with a focus on ads, they would need about 5% of the world market to grow into a comfortable P/E.  Flipping this around, if all advertising were 25% profit (a crazy assumption), there are $100B in profit to be had world wide each year, and the value of the companies might total $2T in aggregate.    The above is a rambling sharing of the reasonable bounds one might expect in analyzing a stock. It can be used for any otherwise finite market, such as soft drinks. There are only so many people on the planet, and in aggregate, the total soft drink consumption can't exceed, say 6 billion gallons per day. The pie may grow a bit, but it's considered fixed as an order of magnitude.   Edit - for what it's worth, as of 8/3/12, the price has dropped significantly, currently $20, and the P/E is showing as 70X. I'm not making any predictions, but the stock needs a combined higher earnings or lower valuation to still approach 'normal.' "You could try this experiment: pay for an Ad/banner on Facebook for 1 month. The Ad/banner should link to your ecommerce site. Then see if the Ad/banner does or does not convert into ecommerce orders (""converting"" means that people coming to your eccomerce site from Facebook after having clicked on your Ad/banner really buy something on your site). If it does convert, you will go on paying for Ads/banners and other people will do the same for their sites, so FB might make cash in next years. But if it does NOT convert you and everybody else will soon discover and stop paying for Ads/banners, thus it will be hard for Facebook to make money with Advertising, thus Facebook might be just a big bubble (unless they find other ways of making money). I did the experiment I suggested above and the conversion rate was an absoulte ZERO!!! (Instead Google Adwords converted well for the same site). So IMHO I would stay away from FB. But remember that stock market is emotional (at least on short periods of time), so it might be that even if FB wil never become a cash cow, for the 1st few months people (expecially small investors tempeted by the brand) might go crazy for the stocks and buy buy buy, making the price go up up up. EDIT in reply to some comments below arguing that my answer was boiled down to one single experiment: General Motors said Tuesday that it will stop paid advertising on   Facebook...the social media paid ads simply weren't delivering the   hoped-for buyers... (CNN May/15/2012) A donkey can not fly either when it's me (with a single experiment) trying to make it fly or the entire GM workforce." "To know if a stock is undervalued is not something that can be easily assessed (else, everybody would know which stock is undervalued and everybody will buy it until it reaches its ""true"" value). But there are methods to assess the value of a company, I think that the 3 most known methods are: If the assets of the company were to be sold right now and that all its   debts were to be paid back right now, how much will be left? This   remaining amount would be the fundamental value of your company. That method could work well on real estate company whose value is more or less the buildings that they own minus of much they borrowed to acquire them. It's not really usefull in the case of Facebook, as most of its business is immaterial. I know the value of several companies of the same sector, so if I want   to assess the value of another company of this sector I just have to   compare it to the others. For example, you find out that simiral internet companies are being traded at a price that is 15 times their projected dividends (its called a Price Earning Ratio). Then, if you see that Facebook, all else being equal, is trading at 10 times its projected dividends, you could say that buying it would be at a discount. A company is worth as much as the cash flow that it will give me in   the future If you think that facebook will give some dividends for a certain period of time, then you compute their present value (this means finding how much you should put in a bank account today to have the same amount in the future, this can be done by dividing the amount by some interest rates). So, if you think that holding a share of a Facebook for a long period of time would give you (at present value) 100 and that the share of the Facebook is being traded at 70, then buy it. There is another well known method, a more quantitative one, this is the Capital Asset Pricing Model. I won't go into the details of this one, but its about looking at how a company should be priced relatively to a benchmark of other companies. Also there are a lot's of factor that could affect the price of a company and make it strays away from its fundamental value: crisis, interest rates, regulation, price of oil, bad management, ..... And even by applying the previous methods, the fundemantal value itself will remain speculative and you can never be sure of it. And saying that you are buying at a discount will remain an opinion. After that, to price companies, you are likely to understand financial analysis, corporate finance and a bit of macroeconomy." "The amount of hype and uneducated investors/speculators driving its prices up. Just by that I would say its prices are inflated. Bear in mind that Facebook don't sell anything tangible. They can go down as fast as they went up. Most of their income is ad based and single-product oriented, and as such highly dependent on usage and trends (remember MySpace?). Having said that, all the other ""classic"" valuation techniques are still valid and you should utilize them."
In a situation like this, I presume you'd invest in the child company if you thought that the child company would increase in value at a higher rate than the parent. You'd invest in the parent company if you thought the parent company would perform well as a whole, but you did not want to assume the risk of an individual company underneath it. Say the child company is worth 100 million, and the parent company is worth 500 million. You've invested a sum of money in the child company. The child company performs very well, and increases in value by, say, 20 million. As the parent company owns the child, we could say it also increases in value by roughly 20 million. The difference is proportional - Your investment in the child sees a 20% gain in value, whereas your investment in the parent sees a 4% gain in total value, as in this example the parent company, which owns nearly 100% of the child company, is worth 5x more and thus proportionally sees 1/5 the increase in value, due to it being worth more as a whole. Think of it similarly to a mutual fund or ETF that invests in many different stocks on the market. As the market does well, that mutual fund or ETF does well, too.  As the mutual fund is made up of many individual stocks, one stock performing very well, say at a 10-20% increase in value, does not raise the value of the ETF or mutual fund by 10-20%. The etf / mutual fund will perform slightly better (Assuming all other components remain equal for this example), but only proportionally to the fraction of it that's made up of the stock that's performing well. "None of that is filtered my way as a ""part owner"". Sure it is, it's just not always obvious. When a company makes money it either: Other then the fourth option, the first three all increase the total value of the company.  If you owned 1% of a company that was worth X, and is now worth X+1, the value of that 1% ownership should go up as well. One model of the value of a share of stock is the present value of all future cash flows that the company produces for its shareholders, which would be either through dividends, earnings (provided that they are invested back into the company) or through liquidation (sale).  So as earnings increase (or more accurately as projected future earnings increase), so does the value of a share of the company. Also note that the payment of dividends causes the price of a stock to go down when the dividend is paid, since that's equity (cash) that's leaving the company, reducing the value of the company by an equivalent amount. Of course, there's also something to be said for the behavioral aspect of investing, meaning that people sometimes invest in companies that they like, and sell stock of companies that they don't like or disagree with (e.g. Nordstrom's)." There is a measure of protection for investors. It is not the level of protection provided by FDIC or NCUA but it does exist: Securities Investor Protection Corporation What SIPC Protects SIPC protects against the loss of cash and securities – such as stocks   and bonds – held by a customer at a financially-troubled SIPC-member   brokerage firm. The limit of SIPC protection is $500,000, which   includes a $250,000 limit for cash. Most customers of failed brokerage   firms when assets are missing from customer accounts are protected.   There is no requirement that a customer reside in or be a citizen of   the United States. A non-U.S. citizen with an account at a brokerage   firm that is a member of SIPC is treated the same as a resident or   citizen of the United States with an account at a brokerage firm that   is a member of SIPC. SIPC protection is limited. SIPC only protects the custody function of   the broker dealer, which means that SIPC works to restore to customers   their securities and cash that are in their accounts when the   brokerage firm liquidation begins. SIPC does not protect against the decline in value of your securities.   SIPC does not protect individuals who are sold worthless stocks and   other securities. SIPC does not protect claims against a broker for   bad investment advice, or for recommending inappropriate investments. It is important to recognize that SIPC protection is not the same as   protection for your cash at a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation   (FDIC) insured banking institution because SIPC does not protect the   value of any security. Investments in the stock market are subject to fluctuations in market   value. SIPC was not created to protect these risks. That is why SIPC   does not bail out investors when the value of their stocks, bonds and   other investment falls for any reason. Instead, in a liquidation, SIPC   replaces the missing stocks and other securities when it is possible   to do so. "But speculation is absolutely intended to happen, and is considered necessary for healthy a investment environment.  What I am saying, however, is that this desire to rid the world of HFT appears to be moral rather than logical. There is very little reason to eliminate HFT as it stands, although there appears to be a propensity for very emotional responses to the basic concept. Ones I can appreciate. However I am suggesting they are misguided as the people who should be upset with HFT are the hedge fund managers and day traders they are outwitting, not you or me who buy and sell shares on a whim every so often. If you want to ban day traders that is a separate argument I don't want to go into.  The idea that these computer algorithms are all set to ""sell,sell,sell"" is provably nonsensical. If that were the case, all of the HFT participants would have gone massively bankrupt during the flash crashes. Also, it is quite patently the case that somebody has to be buying in order for anybody to sell. Saying ""this is what caused some of the crashes"" is just your desire for a simple explanation. It must have been more complex than this, and to my knowledge none of these crashes have been adequately explained although some poorly designed algorithms have been implicated. Note that in one of these cases IIRC a fund closed its doors due to the losses, and the market was largely unaffected. So it seems like a problem that self corrects in this case, and one that only *harms* the participant that erred.  Also, to correct a basic misunderstanding, selling happens all of the time, and does not inherently drive the price down. There are by definition an *equal number of sales to purchases*. What drives the price down is *the people buying being willing to pay less*.  EDIT: as another aside, a point I have made elsewhere and seems suitable to make here: flash crashes, whilst causing panic, are again something only the professional intra-day trading community are likely to be affected by. Their very name implies so. The reason being that anybody investing based on the *long term investment potential* of a company will only benefit in the temporary drop in price, as they can purchase more of the company at a bargain price. Any intelligent investor will not be fazed by the drop in price, as price has *no bearing on a company's real value*, and stocks do tend towards this value over time, whatever happens over the short term. The only case in which it could is if the company owns a large portfolio of stock that itself devalues dramatically that they intended to sell and as a result experience cash flow problems. This is so incredibly unlikely with a flash crash as to be ignored." "That's true; if they could demonstrate that it's damaging to Twitter's growth, they would likely be able to have an impact though it's not clear why they would need to take a stake in that case.  Companies are also a bit loathe to follow investor suggestions on principle -- as a CEO, the last thing you want is to be micromanaged by investors on every decision so going along would be a bad precedent.  I imagine a straight-up social campaign, without the investor angle, would almost be more likely to succeed.  I don't have a great sense for what the value of Trump's account is -- I just know it has a large positive value as I described and a large negative value as you described and I'm not sure of what the sum is but it's definitely not a ""low"" demand -- the value is probably a large number with an unknown sign :)  What I do know is that reports about Trump's tweets led my parents to ask me ""what is this tweet thing?"" and I imagine for a lot of people of their generation, the news coverage was their first introduction to Twitter." It seems to me that your main question here is about why a stock is worth anything at all, why it has any intrinsic value, and that the only way you could imagine a stock having value is if it pays a dividend, as though that's what you're buying in that case.  Others have answered why a company may or may not pay a dividend, but I think glossed over the central question.  A stock has value because it is ownership of a piece of the company. The company itself has value, in the form of: You get the idea. A company's value is based on things it owns or things that can be monetized.  By extension, a share is a piece of all that. Some of these things don't have clear cut values, and this can result in differing opinions on what a company is worth.  Share price also varies for many other reasons that are covered by other answers, but there is (almost) always some intrinsic value to a stock because part of its value represents real assets. isn't it still a dilution of existing share holder stock value ? Whether this is dilution or benefit, only time will tell. The Existing value of Facebook is P, the anticipated value after Watsapp is P+Q ... it may go up or go down depending on whether it turns out to be the right decision. Plus if Facebook hadn't bought Watsapp and someone else may have bought and Facebook itself would have got diluted, just like Google Shadowed Microsoft and Facebook shadowed Google ... There are regulations in place to ensure that there is no diversion of funds and shady deals where only the management profits and others are at loss. Edit to littleadv's comments: If a company A is owned by 10 people for $ 10 with total value $100, each has 10% of the share in the said company. Now if a Company B is acquired again 10 ea with total value 100. In percentage terms everyone now owns 5% of the new combined company C. He still owns $10 worth. Just after this acquisition or some time later ... "The key to evaluating book value is return on equity (ROE). That's net profit divided by book value.  The ""value"" of book value is measured by the company's ROE (the higher the better). If the stock is selling below book value, the company's assets aren't earning enough to satisfy most investors. Would you buy a CD that was paying, say two percentage points below the going rate for 100 cents on the dollar? Probably not. You might be willing to buy it only by paying 2% less per year, say 98 cents on the dollar for a one year CD. The two cent discount from ""book value"" is your compensation for a low ""interest"" rate."