Facebook falls below $30 amid rumors of Opera acquisition

“Facebook shares fell below the $30 mark for the first time Tuesday amid speculation that it is preparing to buy Opera Software, a Norwegian mobile browser developer,” Chris Isidore reports for CNNMoney.

“Shares of Facebook (FB) closed at $28.84, down 9.6%,” Isidore reports. “The stock has now dropped more than 24% of the initial offering price of $38 since its May 18 IPO, just over a week ago.”

Isidore reports, “Of course the Opera speculation is not the major problem for Facebook stock since the IPO. Many questioned the $38 valuation for the stock from the start, since it valued the company at more than 100 times its current earnings.”

Read more in the full article here.

14 Comments

  1. So is buying Opera a bad thing? I personally prefer iCab from the list of third party browsers. But I must be missing something as to why getting a long running browser such as Opera would cause a significant drop in the stock price.
    Disclosure: I own not a single share of FB and don’t expect to add any to my top-heavy-with-one-stock portfolio for at least the next 40 years.

      1. The difference is that Apple is a hardware company that uses vertical software integration to sell hardware.

        Google and Facebook on the other hand are trying to vertically integrate software to sell advertising.

    1. Re: Opera.
      I’ve tried it time and again and dumped it. Meanwhile, I’ve kept iCab from day 1, paid for it on Mac and iOS. Meanwhile, on iOS the Dolphin web browser is my current fave. I just paid for its voice recognition add-on.

      1. Derek,

        I’ve had Dolphin for a while but still haven’t used it much. I do use iCab on iOS though. I sure hope Apple will let us choose a default browser! Happy to see another paying iCab user like me! 🙂

    2. Buying a company means you are spending more money in an already failing business model, means more pain to the stock.
      This could possibly be an addition for a rumored Facebook phone?

  2. Am I right in seeing that as more than a 25% drop from the IPO and almost 40% below the high of a week ago? I guess I’m glad I don’t have any friends who got me in on the IPO.

    1. Many of us have encouraged our real friends to buy AAPL. Some bought only after having challenged our insight on it (years ago). “Double? Yeah right. We’ll see how it does a year from now.” AAPL has repeatedly doubled depending on what point in time you look at. In spite of that history, some “friends” still haven’t taken their friend’s advice. “Friends” who ignored us, instead wanting to invest in the latest get-rich-quick stock are now paying the price. More upside to AAPL coming though we should be keeping a closer eye on how things will be unfolding now.

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