A good friend of mine owns a social media company in SF, a few weeks back he told me that the market was definitely in or entering a "bubble" phase. There is apparently considerable competition between VCs to invest in some of these startups leading to absurdly high implied valuations - which can make it difficult to obtain further rounds of funding as the initial investors are extremely reluctant to let others come on board at lower implied values. I am however not so sure what all this means for the publicly-traded issues that wasn't already fairly clear from the recent price action, or baked into the price to a large extent. AAPL is also an object lesson that just because you're neck-deep in the 'public participation' phase doesn't mean the investment can't perform extremely well for a number of years, nor that the underlying business prospects are necessarily weaker than the public expects.
I was joking with a friend that if FB fell too far on the open they'd announce Buffet was buying preferred shares yielding 8%, followed by all the usual crowing about what a genius investor he is.
Indeed, and another reason to respect price. As yours truly has said before, the crowd is not always wrong... they are only wrong at turning points. Being contrarian at the wrong time, and having a list of "reasons" for such, is akin to arguing with a herd of cattle.
One trader said that the market can act irrationally longer than your net worth can last. I took a beating when I thought markets should go down following the end of LTRO#2 at end of February and stocks continued to rise on expectations for further liquidity. At the time I wish I had no long term market opinion, though sometimes it can pay off. Another trader had said markets are never wrong, but opinions often are.
Merkel now desperate, suggests Greece do a EUR referendum(The same one she hated last year). As previously suggested core Europe won't give in until the last minute. Now they are trying all kinds of verbal bazookas on the hopes they won't go to showdown and have their bluff called