LinkedIn’s 109% pop on first day of trading isn’t close to ‘dotcom era’ IPO jumps
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LinkedIn shares closed at $94.25 on Thursday, up 109% from their IPO’s opening price of $45 a share.
The debut of the social network for professionals on the New York Stock Exchange was ‘spectacular,’ said Los Angeles Times financial columnist Tom Petruno.
‘But in terms of the frothiness quotient, the social networking site’s initial public offering is a piker compared with what we saw during the late-1990s dot-com madness,’ Petruno wrote on our sister blog Money & Company.
LinkedIn shares soared as high as $122.69 during its first full day of trading before closing at $94.25.
‘That’s going to make plenty of the IPO buyers rich (or just richer),’ Petruno wrote. ‘But it ranks far down the list of the all-time biggest first-day IPO gains.’
As he noted, the record is held by VA Linux, which made servers and personal computers running on the ‘once-vaunted’ Linux operating system, he noted. VA Linux held its IPO on Dec. 8, 1999, at $30 a share before closing at $239.25, for a Day-One jump of 698%.
Other dot-com era companies also posted huge IPO jumps, which Petruno compiled in a list of ‘the 10 biggest first-day IPO pops of all time’ in his Money & Company report LinkedIn’s first-day stock pop: Not even close to 1990s dot-com madness.
From Petruno:
Firm......................Date..............First-day gainVA Linux................12/08/99........698%Exodus Commun....03/18/98........637%Theglobe.com........11/12/98........606%Foundry Networks....09/27/99....525%webMethods...........02/10/00......508%MarketWatch.com...01/14/99.....505%FreeMarkets...........12/09/99......483%Cobalt Networks.....11/04/99......482%Akamai Tech...........10/28/99......458%CacheFlow..............11/18/99........427%
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles