(Newser)
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Facebook shares are trading well south of the $38 IPO price, prompting Mark Hulbert of MarketWatch to wonder what the true price should be. Facebook investors might want to shield their eyes from his answer: $13.80. He derives the figure in part with the help of a new study that calculates projected revenue growth for an average company after its IPO. Optimists, of course, can argue that Facebook is no "average" company and could increase its revenue and profitability lickety-split.
But as one of the study authors points out, “the bigger a company gets, the harder it is to maintain percentage growth.” And Facebook is already huge in terms of market cap. Which means, writes Hulbert, that "my back-of-the-envelope calculations for this column could very well be too optimistic rather than too pessimistic." Click for the details.
