Stocks, Social Networking | featured news

The fallout from Facebook Inc's messy initial public offering widened on Wednesday as shareholders sued the social network and its bankers while a trading firm revealed a massive loss on the shares and threatened to seek "remedies."

Facebook on Thursday priced its initial public offering at $38 per share. The social networking company, which is expected to go public tomorrow under the ticker symbol "FB," stands to reap $18.4 billion in the IPO.

Investors who want Facebook Inc shares when the No. 1 online social network goes public later this week may have lost the opportunity. TD Ameritrade and Fidelity's brokerage arm both stopped accepting orders of Facebook shares as of Tuesday evening, according to representatives for each of the companies.

Investors appear to be souring on social networking shares, a development which bodes ill for the eventual IPOs for Facebook, Twitter and other players in the industry. Perhaps unnerved by the lackluster reception for Zynga shares, the sector took a pounding in Monday's trading.

With Google incessantly branching out into even more ventures such as music and social networking, its search business could continue to act as a minor Catch-22 situation in future by helping competition in other business lines.

LinkedIn’s stock opened at $83 after its IPO was priced at $45 and reached an intra-day high of around $123 on the first day. And then a month of carnage started which saw the stock plummeting by 51% from its all-time high. Even though the stock has impressively recovered, climbing almost 75% from its June 20 lows of $60, we remain fundamentally bearish on LinkedIn.

Jim Cramer got really angry on CNBC yesterday. The LinkedIn (LNKD) IPO got him in a tizzy. Why? Because he said that the underwriters for the offering (Morgan Stanley (MS), B of A Merrill (BAC), and JP Morgan Chase (JPM)) decided to play the old “dot com” games of only releasing an artificially small amount of shares on the market, in hopes of creating a feeding frenzy.

Professional networking site LinkedIn raised its price range for its IPO this week by 30%, valuing the company at $4 billion, a strong indication that demand is running high for the new stock.

A strong holiday shopping season will help Google Inc beat Wall Street's quarterly targets again, but investors may need more convincing to buy into the Internet giant's longer-term future.

Facebook plans to split each of highly priced shares into five to help cut their price - the third time the company has done so.