Gambling LNKD - warning

i havent done much research into the business model of linkedin, the obvious revenue generators are the web ads and monthly subscription.

Just so you guys know it's the facebook of the business world. It has 100% market share just like facebook, but for business, and that's not likely to change.

So linkedin is definitely a growth company with a complete market dominance that is vast. It's a well run healthy high growth company, the only question is its valuation at $90+ a share. This is nothing like the other bullshit scams such as groupon etc..

 

haha $8 Billion dollar market cap and only a profit of $15.4 million.


This has got to be the biggest joke....

And let me guess they make their money through "premium subscriptions" and advertising, wow, really the only way these dot coms know how to make money now a days.


Of course the stock price can surge to $176 or even $392 but when reality kicks in and people realize its just another website making money through ads and subscriptions and the hype finally ends probably sometime in the next year after the other 2.0 companies go public this company will be trading under $25 bucks a share and no one will care to own the shares!!!! Too much hype, remember the dot com days, well this is just one of these times that feel like those times all over again!

 

It depends on if the Big Money wants to prop it up. It may have the incentive to hold the price up to prep the way for other "social media" IPOs it wants to bring to market.

Then when everybody is thinking "WOW - these things only go up!! I want IN!!", it's time to unload....

So I wouldn't be surprised at all if this turd keeps floating in the IPO bowl - at least for a while....

 

Cant get anything past you, can I. Posted under a fake nick, so yes, I am done with it under my personal pseudonym.

 

Weird answer but ok. Being 'done' with posting on a website doesn't just mean under one nick, it means posting under any nick. But ok, whatever you say.

 

Yeah, but sometimes you have to take the 12 step program to get clean

 

this summed up my thoughts on LinkedIn pretty well. I am one of those who signed up on LinkedIn a few years ago, and I've never been back on. No one that I know has any use for LinkedIn. My suspicion is that a lot of people who bought the stock have never actually used the website and understand how much it blows. ---

A straw poll of professionals reveals plenty are members of LinkedIn -- but few actually use it
By Ted Samson | InfoWorld

LinkedIn's fate is tied into not just the quantity of data it collects from its users, but also the quality. The quantity is there: The site boasts more than 100 million users. But the important question is how many of those users actively access the site, keep their professional information up to date, share links, participate in discussions, and generally engage with their peers?

The reality is that if most users create an account one day, add a couple of connections, then never come back, the data they've provided doesn't have much value to third parties. The experience for other users becomes boring to the point that they, too, jump ship. LinkedIn may have work to do to keep users interested and involved if it's going to meet investors' and users' expectations.

In a straw-hat poll of some of InfoWorld's contributors -- most of whom are IT professionals -- and others in my professional and social circles, I found that most respondents are members of LinkedIn but rarely or never use the site. The reason: They don't see any value. The exception seemed to be job hunters, recruiters, and consultants. (Notably, I attempted to solicit feedback on the subject from peers via Facebook, email, and LinkedIn. The last option yielded zero responses.)

InfoWorld contributor and professional developer Peter Wayner had this to say about LinkedIn: "It's sure cool and it's fun to look at hierarchies, but I've never had much luck with using it for more than idle curiosity."

Insofar as yielding any kind of professional benefit, Wayner shared this anecdote: "As an experiment, I once tried to follow a chain of so-called friends to get a meeting with someone. The first link in the chain clearly thought that the request was a bit odd and maybe inappropriate. He scrutinized my documents and asked lots of questions. Then he denied having the contact that I could plainly see on LinkedIn. Maybe he wasn't getting in the spirit of things, maybe he was just being smart, but he was so cautious that I've never bothered using the technique again."

Similarly, tech journalist Dan Tynan said that LinkedIn hasn't proved to be particularly useful. He said it can be an effective tool for doing background research, such as grabbing titles or job affiliations, although "you can never really trust that someone has kept his/her profile up to date."

As for finding sources for information, Tynan said, "I occasionally post questions to LinkedIn folks, though I usually don't get too many answers." Further, he said that finding people is difficult because of lackluster search, "especially if they have a common name and you don't know much else about them."

Another thread among the professionals I polled is that LinkedIn can be more of a nuisance than a benefit if you're not actively looking for work. Windows pro Peter Bruzzese, who visits the site about once a month, said he doesn't like being nagged to respond to connection requests. "I feel like [LinkedIn] is a great tool when you are looking for work, but not when you are swamped with work. I think there has to be a way to tailor the amount it bugs you. Or to say, 'I'm not making any new connections right now!'"

Similarly, Tom Maddox, a senior network administrator at Mellon Capital Management, said he hasn't actively used the site in some four years: "I don't use the social media aspects of it at all, and I haven't updated my profile in quite some time. Basically, I keep my LinkedIn connections for the referral potential in the event that I need to look for work."

David Linthicum, consultant and CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, had a much more positive spin on LinkedIn. He uses the site several times a day to "get the 411 on people I may want to work with, may want to hire, may want to network with. Most people in IT have LinkedIn profiles, and you can understand a lot about them from their profile."

He has a problem with the site, though: "I get many people asking me to join their network that turn out to be spammers. You have to be careful whom you accept."

Another drawback, or perhaps a double-edged sword, is that his LinkedIn groups have become too active. "I get about 50 updates a day in my inbox. I've been sending them to junk mail."

Linthicum's wish for LinkedIn is to see "some type of social network profile of each connection, perhaps reaching out to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, such as you can get from third-party analyst tools."

The bottom line here is that LinkedIn needs to be careful that it doesn't turn into a wanna-be Facebook, playing fast and loose with user data while not giving a sufficient reason for users to join up and stick around to provide that data in the first place.

Based on all the people who have signed up with LinkedIn, there must be some demand for a professional social network, a place for networking, collaboration, brainstorming, idea-sharing, finding resources, and the like. But if the site is going to simply be a place where professionals get nothing but sales pitches, unsolicited job offers, and a Facebook-esque feed in exchange for their valuable data (and time), they have no reason to stick around.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/social-n...oure-not-alone-678?source=rss_cloud_computing

 

another convincing article:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — Pencils ready?

Here is today’s math quiz:

How fast must LinkedIn’s earnings grow to justify its current price?

The answer is a matter of simple mathematics. And yet, few have bothered to do the calculations.

Which is surprising. You can debate forever where you think LinkedIn’s stock should be trading, but one thing LinkedIn cannot do is overcome the laws of arithmetic.

Therefore, if you are investing in LinkedIn’s LNKD +0.51% stock at current levels, you implicitly are betting that the company will achieve the requisite growth rate. You might as well know what that is.

So here goes.

For illustration purposes, I will focus on the next five years — though you could do this exercise using any other time frame as well. To solve for LinkedIn’s required growth rate, you need to answer two preliminary questions:

What will be its average annual return between now and May 2016.?

What will be its P/E ratio in five years’ time?

Let’s tackle the first question first. Though the stock market historically has returned about 10% per year on an annualized basis, LinkedIn’s stock will be much, much riskier than investing in the overall stock market. It therefore will need to provide a return significantly greater than 10% annualized in order to compensate investors for this greater risk.

To be conservative, let’s say that LinkedIn’s stock produces a 20% annualized return over the next five years.

Now let’s tackle the second question. Companies as big as LinkedIn — of the nearly 10,000 publicly traded firms in the United States, it’s larger than all but 399 of them — don’t trade forever at a sky-high P/E. On the contrary, that ratio inevitably declines as such companies grow and mature.

To put this question in an historical context, consider that the long-term average P/E ratio for all stocks is around 15. Among mid- and large-cap companies, even the fastest-growing ones typically do not have P/E ratios higher than 30 or 40.

To again be conservative, let’s assume that LinkedIn’s P/E in May 2016 is still as high as 50. (It’s over 500-to-1 currently.)

Guess what: With those two assumptions, LinkedIn’s earnings per share will have to grow at an average rate of 91.6% per year for the next five years.

Don’t like this answer? Go ahead and try playing around with the numbers. You’ll be hard pressed to come up with an answer that you’ll like any better.

Take a look at the accompanying spreadsheet. Each of the cells lists the required EPS annualized growth rate over the next five years to support the assumptions that are listed.
May 2016 P/E = 30 May 2016 P/E = 40 May 2016 P/E = 50 May 2016 P/E = 60
5% annualized return for stock 85.7% 75.3% 67.7% 61.7%
10% annualized return for stock 94.6% 83.7% 75.7% 69.4%
15% annualized return for stock 103.4% 92.0% 83.7% 77.1%
20% annualized return for stock 112.3% 100.4% 91.6% 84.8%

To give you an idea of how unlikely such growth rates are, consider a landmark study that appeared several years ago in the prestigious Journal of Finance. Entitled “The Level and Persistence of Growth Rates,” it was written by three finance professors: Josef Lakonishok and Louis K. C. Chan, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Jason Karceski of the University of Florida.

The professors studied the earnings-growth rates of U.S. publicly traded companies between 1952 and 1997. One of the things they were looking for were companies whose earnings grew for five years straight at more than the median rate. That’s not asking much, since that median was around 10% per year — far lower than the 62% to 112% growth rates that appear in the above table.

Yet the professors found very few companies that were able to ever meet this modest precondition. This was true even among tech companies, furthermore.

To be sure, there have been companies that have beaten these odds. The most celebrated example of recent memory is Google GOOG +0.42% , of course.

But, given the sky-high growth rates necessary to support LinkedIn’s current price, along with the professors’ research, Google’s experience is very much the exception that proves the rule.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/li...do-the-math-2011-05-24?link=MW_story_popularb

 

this is the beauty of the stock market. I know this guy who makes $5M+ year after year(20+ gas stations) and his net worth is something like $45M....and not $3Billion....

 

It is a gamble but most traders are gamblers....and guess what, you won't trade forever, no matter how young you are.