ISAs, SIPPs, funds and shares

EXCEPTIONAL analysis of the history of Valley (Facebook) IPOs & Wall Street competition #kudos #li #fb

Description of MorganStanley's management of Facebook's IPO process + interaction (not) with other investment banks

MUSTread: Fact-based story on potential analyst/underwriting irregularities during Facebook IPO

Allegation Morgan Stanley withheld information from the public

via http://interconnected.org/home/2012/04/03/peak_attention_and_the_dupont_equation "The lesson: Return on Equity, like peacock tail splendor, is a very poor guide for allocating resources. It fails for two reasons. First, fixating on ROE fails to maximize the benefit of business to society because it measures value in terms of returns to only one stakeholder; second, it allocates human resources as if maximizing the efficiency of financial capital were critical to growth of social welfare."
"Looking at Apple, you'd conclude it had been using this equation for a long time. It has focused on building an ecology, earning its fair share of the rewards but leaving plenty for others who can earn them (at the expense of those who have historically extracted margin from market power by restricting the market). Apple's offers are more highly valued than its competitors '— largely for intangible reasons ranging from design to sustainable disposability — and have extremely broad appeal globally. And it has brought true innovation to market more frequently than perhaps any other consumer products company ever."

At SV Angel, we have a chart of “mega-trends” that we follow closely. The first and most obvious is social. We see a new kind of entrepreneur emerging in social. We call them “Behavioral Entrepreneurs.” These behavioral entrepreneurs understand that hardcore algorithms are no longer essential for success. Great UI and UX are becoming the new IP. Thanks to the low cost of computing, these entrepreneurs find innovation in human behavior, not pure technology.
Another mega trend we see is the intersection of real-time data and collective wisdom, where audiences contribute value the bulk of the content, enabling other services to build value by mashing up the layers. Quora is the perfect example.
Social commerce is also huge, as are big data, online-to-offline and, of course, mobile.