It is another nail in the coffin for the future of Wall Street research. All the experts on the topic of social graphs, the social web, the mobile mobile and the internet are outside the walls of Wall Street and the metrics that matter will be conceived by the masses on Twitter, Stocktwits and Facebook.

Facebook is going to raise $15 (fifteen) billion from the public. As a frame of reference, $GOOG has about $47 billion in the bank and $58 billion.

Microsoft raised something like $50 million from their IPO. They did so with over 300 banks on the sales book. With Facebook, the $15 billion will be raised with less than 5.

Yes, times have changed.

This morning I woke up to find $FB trending on Stocktwits in my inbox and on our iPhone app and website (despite the fact that it is not yet public). The best research is coming from friends of mine on the web, who live with the product 24/7. The irony of Wall Street profiting from the IPO when they can’t even use the product within the bank firewall’s is upsetting, but I look at it as a fading symbol.

All of a sudden, the whole twittersphere is the best analyst on the subject of the biggest IPO in history. All of a sudden, by just linking a twitter account to a stocktwits account and tagging Facebook $FB, Stocktwits can aggregate and curate a whole new crop of amazing social web, and mobile web analysts who run companies and share insights from a global prespective 24/7/365.

An amazing post from my partner Phil Pearlman on the ‘false truths’ of Social Finance.

Watch Jon Steinberg talk about the ‘share it’ vs ‘search it’ world we now live in.

Read this great post from Peter Pham on Facebook as a Passport.

Robert Peck’s deep dive on Facebook upside potential Here is a link to his Stocktwits stream which is a must follow.

TechMeme (been reading for 5 years) continues as a top 5 place for the most interesting technology research/news the biggest public companies in all of tech.

Facebook is democratizing so many things. Twitter followed suit. AngelList, TechStars and Kickstarter are accelerating the trend. Now on Stocktwits, the best voices related to the new public and non public ‘technology’ companies can be discovered as people adopt the $FB language.

Let’s keep tagging and sharing and please link up your Stocktwits account to your Twitter account so your $(ticker symbol) mentions make it to our large community to be read and shared throughout the deep vertical of finance.

What really changes when Facebook goes public this Thursday?

For one, with the Facebook $FB IPO, there will be less secrets in social. There will be more hype about ‘data’ as a business model. There will be way more pressure on companies to explain their mobile monetization strategies.

Like good and bad ‘naked’ (Seinfeld), there will be good and bad ‘social’.

If Greece implodes, Facebook and Apple won’t be dead, but they will get lower multiples on their real metrics and cute metrics.

You need to have a plan and luckily, if you follow price, you are always way ahead of the game. Right now I am building some lists of strong internet businesses like Zillow ($Z) and Expedia $EXPE) that are holding up really well in this crappy tape.

I talk about all of the above and more in greater detail in this week’s show below. Enjoy.

First off, I could call my buddies at JP Morgan, or as I like to cal them ‘Jip Me’ Morgan and turn that into $3 trillion in derivatives and plunk it down in a greek recovery led by the lovely ‘Golden Dawn’ party.

I kid.

There is no one way that Ross can fix things. The Board is a shitshow of ego’s and self dealers.

I would focus on the strengths like Sports and Finance where the demographics of the user are best and wrap a communication product around them to start. I would continue to slash and burn on the executive side of people in power more than 6 years. Cut until something breaks.

On the acquisition and growth side, i think for example, Yahoo could buy Hootsuite to put them in the real-time communication dashboard business. I would also than focus on the fastest way to socialize certain verticals of their data.

As fast as possible, I would be turning the data inside out, much like Chartbeat (a Betaworks) company does for publishers.

Display advertising, like page views, is a busted and stressful business. Yes it scales, but more Companies need to think like Bloomberg and less like Silicon Valley as we head into the next phase of the mobile web. Communications, data and social graphs are all possibilities off the traffic funnels of Yahoo’s main sites.

Ross and his tightest group of lieutenants need to plant themselves in every nook and cranny of Y Combinator, Tech Stars and Angel List to start scouting and drafting better. Take risk early. Give new people some flexibility to make mistakes without layers of management.

Finally screw quarterly results for the first 18 months.

The idea of an asset sale that passes the traffic potato into someone else’s hands is most likely, but I would love to see something else emerge for the good of the legacy web.

Good luck Ross.

The Momentum stocks are cracking. Today it was $FOSL which is a store I have never shopped in but a teen favorite. Rackspace $RAX, a longtime holding, also got whacked today. As I say in the show, this stuff just happens to you when you invest in big trends and momentum stocks. The cracks at the edge of momentum land have started to bleed into the general market, but institutions should step into the market here. Institutions have to follow one another and are generally lazy thinkers so markets just work this way. It’s an uptrend. That said, I am watching my stocks like I always do and catching up on other work while earnings season runs it’s course.

Corrections come and go and new leaders will emerge as they have always done. Some of them might be actually the old leaders that are holding well in the pullback. You will find them on the StockTwits 50 list, which Ivan curates for us every week.

I still like my positions in software $ARBA, $RAX, $TIBX, mobile payments: $EBAY, $V, 3D Printing – $DDD and fashiology – $NKE. The longer-term trends there are not broken and I might even add to some of them.

Enjoy the show

Sorry about the sound for the first 10 minutes of the show.

I have so much fun making Momentum Monday with Jon and Ivan. It helps me think about the bigger picture and catch up on what I am doing right and wrong over time. I promise to be more careful about the production value going forward. I am just trying to be consistent producing the show.

The valuations of todays tech leaders is getting hard for most to digest. It is upsetting the non participators. Facebook is less than 10 years old and can pay $1 billion for 3 year old Instagram which is more than ANYONE will pay for The New York Times. Facebook is worth $50 billion more than News Corp.

Today my son max turned 13, but on Facebook (which he is not allowed to use) he is 17. His nieces and nephews can’t reach him ny phone, text, Facebook, my phone….he is off the grid. He is total command of his communications. A taker, not a giver to the network. As fickle as his communication habits are at age 13, I can understand the chase that’s on to control the networks of the future and the wild growth and volatility in valuations. It’s just the age we are living in so if it’s too hard for you to live with, ignore them as investments, but do not ignore them as tools for your business.

I am fascinated by the recent volatility and stalling in $AAPL. I believe it is more than the law of large numbers. If any company in the history of the world deserves the first TRILLION $ valuation, it is Apple. If they continue to grow modestly off this last quarter numbers they should get that historic valuation. If it deserves it in three years on modest growth, surely it should trade there for at least an hour today..no? Tune in to the show and get a more detailed explanation on what I think is happening.

If you hate Apple, social networks and are sick of the internet, there are still plenty of new leaders to consider. On the show, I review some of the positions in my LightSpeed Momentum portfolio: $ARBA, $DDD, $MANH, $COP and Ivan shares some of this favorite setups for the moment: $HK, $CTXS, $ALGN, $MLNX

The bubble discussion is on in full force today again. Chris Dixon starts off the latest meme. Nick Bilton, from The New York Times…now at a valuation less than Instagram (so not sure it is worth the read versus sharing another photo), chimes in here. Personally, I don’t like when journalists focus in on massive outliers to prove a point.

I would argue from my experience starting and investing in companies that we have too many Wantrepreneurs. It is very difficult to define an entrepreneur today. The fact that we are using a french word to define it is a problem in of itself.

You can’t have a bubble in startups when it costs so little to start a business. We do have too many startups with angel valuations that are way too high. We are not near the point where the average investor owns these. Yes, Fidelity wants into this space, but Fidelity can’t get in. I would even argue that we need dumber institutional money in the angel space because I want to hire kids that have tried to be an entrepreneur. They can learn about business models in a textbook or on successful entrepreneur blogs while getting stiffed by a customer after flying the redeye.

We will hit the point, likely soon, when the cost of starting a business is offset by the high cost of getting traction and keeping it. I am most wary of this when investing today.

The stock market is far from a bubble. Check prices in Europe. China stocks have crumbled. Solar…dead. Housing…bull trap.

There is so much money on the sidelines waiting for a HINT of good news. It shows up on the edges in the meantime (see $CTXS last week). It shows up on Angelist and it shows up at Y Combinator and TechStars and in the stocks of global consumer brands. It makes total sense to me.

I love all the old fart money on the sidelines. It won’t stay there. They will be chasing bad network effect ideas while the smart money money moves to a different pool to feed on.

Feed Mayo to the Tuna….(first one with the correct movie reference in the comments gets a Stocktwits t-shirt).

The elevator pitch is simple: run your own TV station online by inputting the URL of any public web video or live stream, and scheduling it to run at a specific time.  StationCreator empowers anyone with a desire to curate and run their own broadcast TV network online for free (including of course TV networks themselves).

StationCreator is the idea of Jon Labes who worked with me at Wallstrip and most recently at Stocktwits, before convincing Tom and I at Social Leverage to incubate and invest in his vision. I love the web video space as much as Jon. I have investments in Tubemogul, Videolicious, and Ontheair as well. StationCreator is working on a huge vision. Last week Jon went to the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas to show off the brand new product. Michael Rosenblum, co-founder of CurrentTV (with Al Gore and Joel Hyatt) had this to say about the product:

This is a very cool bit of tech that allows anyone to create their own TV network online.

For free.

For Free.

And it seems to do pretty much all the stuff that the ‘big boys’ are selling for many millions of dollars.

Well, that’s technology for you.

Maybe the Great Content Shift is more about everyone making their own TV network for free, as opposed to paying out millions of dollars to old analog tech firms to try and do it for you? Could be.

In the meantime, maybe David Zazlov, the CEO at Discovery Networks should give Jon Labes a call.

According to Nielsen, the average US household watches online video for 27 minutes per week.  Compare that to 35 hours per week the same US household watches broadcast TV.  35 hours! You can see where we’re going with this. Broadcast television is a global phenomenon, reaching 99% of the world’s population.  Over the past 60 years, tuning into channels of continuous video has become highly addictive learned behavior for nearly every human on earth.

It’s no wonder the general consensus about online video is that it is hard to find “good” content.  Online video is built entirely around search.  Once you find what you’re looking for, then what?  With traditional broadcast television, watching video is a refined, user-friendly experience: turn on your TV, and video comes to you.  It doesn’t matter what plays, because the viewer understands the reputation of the broadcaster, who puts a stamp of approval on content simply by playing it on their channel.  If watching TV is eating at a four-star restaurant, then finding something good to watch on YouTube is dumpster diving.

StationCreator recreates the broadcast television format using online video.  Today they’ve launched the first version of the platform for broadcasters to curate online TV stations, which can be embedded in a custom player on their site, blog, Facebook page, or anywhere else HTML is accepted.  Sure, this is exciting stuff, but what really motivates the StationCreator team to get out of bed every morning is what they’re releasing next: a portal for watching online television. Ostensibly, a more advanced version of cable television. Online. For free.

The fact that the videos playing on these “tv stations” are hosted on web services like YouTube, Vimeo, Livestream or Ustream is not important.  Sure you could go watch the same video there at its source.  The problem is that each video on the web is a one-off experience.  When it ends, the user needs to take action to watch something else.  That action is usually searching for another video.  Want to watch a video hosted on a different sharing site?  You’ll need to go to a whole new site and begin the process over again.

The world is clamoring for free TV, and increasingly desiring it on computers, smartphones, and tablets.  Cable TV is too expensive, and your dinner is hot and on the table.  Would you like to search for a specific video, or would you like to tune into a channel where a publisher you trust curates a continuous schedule of videos they want you to watch?

What’s going to be on internet TV you ask?  Take a moment to think about everyone in the world who can’t afford the tens of millions of dollars to operate a terrestrial TV station, but has interest in running one. Print media publications, organizations of all kinds, retailers, entertainers, bloggers, and any individual who thinks they have great taste would run their own TV station if cost were removed as a barrier to entry.  When you turn on internet TV later this year, you will be surprised by the channels you’ll watch, flipping between legendary rock concerts, world news, the political candidate you support, a famous comedian’s favorite TV episodes, and a live stream of the local high school’s football game.

The internet is full of good videos.  StationCreator is where we want you to tune into them.

I spent most of today at the skin doctor. It is amazing what they can do with needles, numbing agents and lasers to clean up time and the sun. I am grateful.

Back to business…it is ‘Momentum Monday’ on this blog and there is plenty of things to talk about. It’s worth watching my show to hear Ivan say ‘shitcanned’ in the same sentence as Netflix.

Yes, Netflix $NFLX is cooked and has been so for months, while $AAPL is the market’s doctor that has all the answers (revenue, margin and profit growth). $LULU owns lifestyle for ladies and Under Armor $UA owns the sweaty cheap men and the women that like buying gear for them. Biotech continues to show leadership if you can live with the volatility.

If you like stocks and you like talking about them all day long, Stocktwits is for you.

People that love stocks and talk about them all day long are a unique group.  They create a unique narrative and data set as they move through the site over a 24 hour period.  With our Stocktwits ‘heatmap’, we can offer an inside out view and begin to display the interesting signals and discussions.  We believe it will help more people engage and share. I think we can speed up people’s understanding of markets and the people mentorship model of the social web will work it’s magic once again.

The website continues to evolve as we grow.

As an investor and sometimes trader myself, I am excited to be part of a Company that helps disseminate, receive and organize market and stock information faster than ever before. Herb Greenberg, who has been covering stocks and financial markets for over 30 years said the following about Stocktwits:

Whoever thought I would be getting story ideas from the stock tickers that are “trending” real-time on a three-year-old site called StockTwits, which has become the Twitter of stocks? I certainly didn’t until I realized some of these out-of-the-way names were trending for a reason. Now, whenever I want to know why something is happening to a company, the first thing I do is check out the real-time feeds on StockTwits.

Price and volume data are a commodity in 2012. I have wanted to add a people layer ever to the equation since I got excited about the social/people web.

‘Big Data’ is the buzzword of 2012.  The social footprint is now a unique dataset for Facebook, Twitter, Stocktwits and hundreds of other companies using the open API’s of today’s social leaders to create derivative data points.

In the investment world, while the machines grind it out on the line of scrimmage, people should circling the machines. There are so many ways to connect the new data signals. Intuitively, I have my ideas around momentum and now I can connect a lot of the dots with partners and check for correlations. In fact, the stream is like a new ticker tape which I have called ‘The Human Ticker’.  I believe you can learn to read it.  Others just want to see visualizations of the footprints.

I don’t only want to know the breakouts and breakdowns and all-time highs or stocks hitting the 200 day moving average, I want to know who in my peer group is looking and what they are doing with the price and volume data. What they are sharing most. What they are ignoring and not talking about.

Trading and Investing does not need to be done alone. We look forward to your feedback. Also – Erin Griffith at PandoDaily covered the launch today as well.

I always feel like a 1 percenter. I have good income, friends, a home…I make investments.

All that was left for 1 percenter nirvana was no taxes.

Until today.

Color me 99 percent.

The 99 percent just sucks ass.