Internet, Yelp Ipo | featured news

The stock market operates in mysterious ways. Yelp shares are actually trading sharply higher this morning, despite the expiration of the company's post-IPO lock-up period. As I noted earlier, the stock had lost about a third of its value in anticipation of today's event; for reasons that are not entirely clear, the stock has responded to the news with a major rally.

Consumer review website Yelp Inc's shares traded more than 60 percent above their initial public offering price in their market debut on Friday, as investors rushed to buy a piece of the growing local advertising market... Yelp's shares were trading up 62 percent at $24.60 on Friday morning. At that level, the company is valued at about $1.43 billion -- about 17 times its 2011 revenue.

It's likely that investors will see a first-day rise in Yelp's shares during its IPO this week, but the ability of the online review site to hold on to those debut gains is debatable.