Facebook $FB (should be $FBOOK) is the new Location Location Location.

Stocks generally do well when I give them this triple title…I did so for $LULU a while back. It is fun to see it all come together as both companies hit all time highs and LULU become the ‘Facebook of ladies tooshies’.

I have been mostly wrong about Facebook the stock. It is hard to get a Company right when you don’t use their product on a steady basis. Directionally I have never been bearish, so I guess I should have been buying. Here is one example of a post I did in 2009 titled ‘Twitter…What Would You Pay’. In 2007, I said ‘Hurry up and Get Public‘. Also from 2007, I thought a consumer brand like Coke or American Express should have bought Facebook and now Procter and Gamble is laying off 1600 employees as Facebook goes public.

As usual, most of us are wrong and a few make all the money.

Of course yesterday I got a call from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times yesterday asking for all my thoughts on Facebook. Is it a buy or a sell?

I have no opinion on Facebook itself, but it will help drive capital and profits all over the place in many amazingly good ways and create havoc for certain industries as well. Facebook the stock is just one piece of the giant puzzle of the market. For example, if you work in TV and Radio sales, your job is getting tougher. The IPO just put the toughness at all time highs. But, if you are a GREAT TV ad salesmen, your job got easier and LinkedIn will have your phone buzzing with recruitment offers.

It’s about watching the money flow and today is no different than yesterday in the business of managing money.

As per the Facebook IPO, I liked the following pieces:

Andy Kessler – ‘The Button that Made Facebook Billions‘

The Globe and Mail – ‘Why Facebook May not Be a Growth Story‘ (begs the question…define growth).

Dara Albright – ‘Where is Facebook’s Audacious S1‘

Dan Ramsden – He is tearing it up with great analysis in an easy to digest way – ‘A Way to Look at Network Value‘

Right now though, all I can think about is …so much money left on the table.

But, who has not left money on the table. It’s just part of the game…the business…life.

Screw that…it hurts. In today’s version of the game of ‘I can’t believe how much money I left on the table’ is $GSVC. Some of my good friends are very long $GSVC. Smart guys. It’s really a simple thesis. Own the derivative of $FBOOk and wait for the announcement. It’s not perfect and is never smooth, but today is the payday.

The Twitter run could have been played with $SINA and the $GRPN run with Trvelzoo $TZOO.

I just got an update from Betaworks today. Really an amazing Company. Betaworks is at the center of the social and web revolution in New York City. I invested in late 2008 because of my strong belief in New York, the angel scene, the web, the idea of Betaworks, the portfolio and the genius of John Borthwick and Andy Weissman. I wanted to leverage my time and reach. I was starting Stocktwits and would never be able to see everything I wanted. So I invested and they invested in Stocktwits.

I was very bullish on the idea of another $CMGI. Another Internet Capital Group $ICGE. The financial markets love a well timed roll-up. I have the ticker picked out for Betaworks ..it’s live on Stocktwits $BWORK. Andy and John will vouch for the many times I said, get Betaworks public and take advantage of the valuation boom ahead. Today we are seeing what happens when the stars align for being a PUBLIC Company at the right time in a fat trend.

Alas, it is $GSVC that is making all the money today in the ‘own a piece of Facebook and Twitter’ game that is Wall Street. Big Kudos.

There are many ways to be right. It’s why I am addicted to the markets and sharing my thoughts.

Monday night at 7, StockTwits will gather for cold beers and eats at Antarctica in Soho.

Please join us.

Where:  287 Hudson Street (below Spring)

When: Jan 30 @ 7PM

Apple is a ‘Magnificent’ Company.

Scott O’Neill of Investors Business Daily shared this chart that helps quantify the difference between great and magnificent:

A couple of fun facts:

1. Apple earned more money in the last quarter than the stock was worth 8 years ago (thanks Eddy Elfenbein)

2. Apple’s current cash level of $97+ billion is more than the MARKET CAPS of 474 S&P 500 companies! (thanks Bespoke)

Apple is not alone in it’s Magnificent’ execution and performance. Monster energy is a ‘Magnificent’ Company.

Monster ($MNST) is one of the great stocks of all time. IT’s market capitalization and earnings have both increased 200 times since going public. Earnings do matter.

On it’s way to ‘Magificent’ are Chipotles ($CMG) and LULU Lemon ($LULU). In the meantime, they are pretty damn great stocks.

You can get rich owning a basket of great stocks over a 10 year period, but you will get ‘RICHHHH’ finding one ‘Magnificent’ Company.

We are at 11 year highs in the Nasdaq for a bunch of reasons and none of them are because of a bubble.

Here is my ‘Momentum Monday‘ that delves a little deeper and covers some more potential winners in this strong tape.

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S&P Capital IQ is a leading provider of research and analytics to institutional investors, investment advisors and wealth managers globally.

5 of the S&P Capital IQ analysts have already begun using StockTwits Pro and are sharing informed analysis across a wide variety of topics. They include:

Mark Arbeter – Chief Technical Strategist forecasts the major indices, stock sectors, the treasury market and currencies using chart pattern analysis, market internals, sentiment and intermarket analysis.

Tuna Amobi - Director at S&P Capital IQ’s Equity Research Services covering the Media and Entertainment industry, head of the consumer discretionary sector and member of S&P’s Analytical Policy Board.

Scott Kessler – Senior Director leading S&P Capital IQ’s Technology Sector equity research efforts and also covering Internet and Software stocks including Apple, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, Oracle and other related companies.

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I don’t own the stock, but it is about time and I want to.

If you asked 100 random people in the street to describe Nike in the streets with one word/phrase…they would likely use ‘swoosh’ Just Do It’or shoes.

Just loving the company for those basic things has earned investors from 1977 a 27,000 % return. The Company trades at just 2 times sales with $3 billion in cash. Sometimes the ‘big idea’ is sitting in your closet with no hard drive, just laces.

I was in New York this week, and as noisy and as hectic as it can be versus say….the beach on Coronado, the different energy gets me thinking about bigger ideas in many more ways. It’s likely the exciting conversations and the back and forth with high energy people.

I have watched and written about the biotech industry for a few years act as a leader in the markets. The stocks on a whole make me nervous, but I have been following the $IBB. I don’t want to own stocks I can’t understand wrt growth cycles or competition or acceptance and government regulation.

But Technology is changing biotech and data is changing biotech. In 2012 and beyond, pills, painful treatment and machines may not solely define the world of biotech. The world of biotech will extend to electronics, data and services.

Nike will help this all become mainstream. They are late to market with their ‘Fuel Band‘, but their massive distribution will make this a winner over time and many iterations. Smaller companies like Fitbit will face competition for sure, but Nike will increase the market by hundreds of folds.

While investors argue over the margins from the products and their usefulness, the data will spawn thousands of companies in the service space that tap into the data. I am seeing it on Angel List daily and I am making a few investments. Consumer electronics, data and some structured service type solutions is a new form of biotech and even a replacement for many of the drugs we take each day.

Am I early…NO! Is Nike, the best way to play this trend…not sure. Is the trend Gynormous….YES!

The last clue sent them to Dog Beach to grab a picture with a dog. Done.

The year 2012 will be a great one to start a business. I say this every month and every year. It’s always the same reasons. There are great prizes along the way for the entrepreneurs and the costs have never been lower.

This year, with all the new entrepreneurs and startups in the web world, there is a lot of ‘bubble talk’. All of a sudden, the ‘media’ is very concerned for investors about to lose their shirt by overpaying for ‘social networking’ and other web startups.

It has to be a ‘bubble’ because CES broker attendance records for people to see old man @rupertmurdoch shoot dice and yammer about Google being evil, Polaroid (I am an investor) battle Eastman Kodak ($EK) on the exhibit floor, crowd around some 3d tv’s and walk by a bunch of ipad cases and phone chargers.

But Howard…isn’t it important that my new Samsung Fridge has a $P Pandora option on the freezer door?

The thing is, people are schlepping in record droves. Paul Graham nails it with what he calls ‘Schlep Blindness.’

There is never a bubble in ‘Schlep Blindness’.

You will never find enough entrepreneurs willing to schlep and enough money to back the people willing to schlep because of their blindness.

As an entrepreneur you can win when you make the 50 extra yearly schleps (cold calls, ‘red eye’ flights to see customers, late night product sessions ‘evolving’ your product after hundreds of discussions with your users). As an angel investor you can make money in any environment by spotting these schleppers.

Side note -there will probably be light blogging again from me this week as I schlep to New York today.

If you have 20 during today’s trading day give it a listen and/or watch.

It’s just been a hard market for leadership and momentum with traps like $GOOG and software lately for me and a herky jerky market with last years DREKKK rising and leadership from Biotech ($IBB).

I have no doubt in my mind that Life Sciences is in a massive trend and while Silicon Valley may cool down, Sorrento Valley (San Diego) will heat up.

You can’t have all this cash slosh around and not chase some real returns. People want to live longer and as Mark Cuban discussed in my interview with him last year…personalized medicine and treatments is just big an idea to fail. He has been dead on since we chatted.

Keep it simple and stick to a plan.

Predictions are uncool.

Wall Street will be cool again.

We need a New improved Wall Street (must read). We need some fresh thinking and better marketing. I mean ‘bulletin boards’ as a name for an exchange that trades public securities?

We need IPO’s not RE-IPO’s.

The best thing for any industry is that predictions go away and that holds especially true for the financial industry.  So, it’s great news, despite the stupid headline, that people in high places are tiring of the game. The word ‘guru’ makes me cringe.

There are no ‘gurus’…there are great forecasters that manage risk.

It’s quite obvious to me and my money is where my mouth is that the social and mobile web have really broken down the final walls of Wall Street and they are now coming down super fast.Bloomberg’s cute ‘dot com’ stuff is a front for their humongous wall. I doubt that wall can be brought down, but you never know. It will take some deep pockets, some big mistakes from Bloomberg and even then, you are talking a decade or two.

The online brokerage industry did it’s thing to ‘the street’ and much of the transaction business is commoditized. TheStreet.com ($TST) helped usher in the period of commoditizing Wall Street opinions so kudos to Jim and team.

But, it’s the mobile and social web that are going to force a better rebuilding of The Street.

Wall Street is super important.  It can’t go away and we should not be wishing that.  If you are short Wall Street just remember that Silicon Valley has been written off a few times as well.

Good times!

We thought it would be interesting to look back at the tickers that shaped the year. The most active tickers tagged ($ticker) on Stocktwits over the course of the year were:

$SPY S&P
$AAPL Apple
$ES_F S&P Futures
$EURUSD Euro/US Dollar (Makes sense since 2011 was the year of Currency Intervention)
$NFLX Netflix
$GOOG Google
$QQQ Nasdaq 100
$CL_F Crude Oil
$GLD Gold ETF
$SLV Silver ETF
$AMZN Amazon
$BAC Bank of America
$RIMM Research in Motion
$GS Goldman Sachs
$IWM Russel 2000 ETF
$STUDY STUDY (Stocktwits created tag for a study link or idea)
$SINA SINA (Chinese company)
$BIDU Baidu (Chinese Company)

These tickers do cover a lot of ground as to the big stories, but there are many layers to the market which include the investors, the traders, the companies and the tickers. Month to month, StockTwits members captured snapshots of the big moves and trends on Chartly, often before they happened, and shared the messages on the stream.

Over the course of twelve months and millions of messages, It is fun and informative to look at the data from milllions of messages from the last 12 months. There are many ways we intend to go deeper because it will make us smarter investors. At Stocktwits we are building a platform for you to research and discover the right ideas from the right people at the right time. It really happens.

January

Semicondutor stocks and more specifically anything that was considered a smart phone play, went bizonkers in January. Big beneficiaries were $ARMH, $MIPS, $ENTR, $APKT, $ATML…Even large cap $NVDA had a record start of the year – it went up 80% in the first 6 weeks of 2011 (it finished the year down 10 percent).

@SteelerTrader was among the numerous people on StockTwits, who noticed the strength in semiconductors and posted this bullish setup on Chart.ly on January 2nd, 2010:

February

Momentum can destroy even the most solvent investors (if not their pocketbook…their ego, confidence and reputation). This February, Withney Tilson threw in the towel after stubbornly trying to short the “freight trains” $NFLX, $GMCR, $LULU, $OPEN. Ironically 3 out of those 4 stocks finished the year at least 50% below their February highs. A classic reminder that valuation may show you what and why to short, but not when.

Green Mountain Coffee $GMCR reached new all-time highs. It went on to triple over the next 7 months. Plagued by suspicions of accounting irregularities and heavy short selling, it gave up most of its gain in the last 3 months of the year.
@Tea8207 highlighted the forthcoming short squeeze on February 17, 2011:

March

Social media stocks reached for the sky. $SINA (aka the Twitter of China) was the only publicly traded direct play of the industry at the time. It more than doubled in the first 4 months of the year, only to finish with a loss. $SINA was not able to escape the reputation guillotine applied to anything China related after a number of Chinese reverse merger ADRs were caught in creative accounting schemes.

@flare9x pointed out the long setup in $SINA in early March. The stock went up 50% in the next month before it reversed.

Also in March, most uranium related stocks lost 50% or more of their market cap in a week after the devastating earthquake in Japan endangered the safety of several nuclear reactors. This move came as a shock for many market participants as many of the uranium stocks had tripled and quadrupled in the last quarter of 2010 in expectations nuclear would play a significant role in the world energy supply. Most uranium stocks finished the year significantly below even these March lows. $URZ pictured below closed below $2.

April

Silver went parabolic. The reflation trade was on in full force at the time, and precious metals were the big beneficiaries. Silver went up 70% in the first 4 months of 2011, only to finish the year down 10%.

The super talented @PeterLBrandt followed the silver saga closely and was among the first to highlight the distribution in the name:

May

$LNKD completed a very hot IPO. They offered only 5% of the shares outstanding, which created tremendous volatility. This approach was later adopted by $GRPN and $ZNGA. All stocks finished the year below the opening print on their IPO day.

@WeeklyTa spotted the shorting opportunity early in the game:

June

Greece appeared on the front pages and the stock market entered into severe correction. Coffee stocks were still hot and making all-time highs on an almost daily basis. ($GMCR $PEET $JVA)

$RIMM accelerated its free fall as it continued to lose ground against iPhone and Android-powered devices. By June, the “The Candadian Calculator”, had lost 50% of its market cap. Who would have thought at the time that, it has anotehr 70% of downside for the rest of the year.

@1nvestor pointed the trouble just in time for those willing to monetize it:

July

Treasuries broke out from a major resistance. $TLT gained 29% for the year, turning into the best performing asset class for 2011.

@Xiphos_Trading pointed the potential monstrous short squeeze that was in the making:

McDonald’s reached an all-time high and went straight up from there. The fast food chain gained 30% for the year. In fact, 2011 turned out to be a very good year to fast food. Pizza stocks rocked, two of them doubled ($PZZI, $DPZ) and even I like the ‘Artisan Pizza’ from Domino’s.

Also in July, most major bank stocks were the first to break down to new 52 week lows, foretelling the near-term destiny of the rest of the market. Later in the summer, Warren Buffet followed the advice of his rubber ducky and tried to fill the holes in Bank of America. His time horizon is forever, and his security much safer than your common stock, so his actions tell little about what to expect in the financial sector for 2012.

August

The season of waterfalls. Stocks went into heavy correction as European sovereign debt issues reappeared on the front pages of the mainstream press. The U.S. government debt rating was downgraded. Gold became the ultimate safety trade. The yellow metal blew through the top rail of its long term bullish trend channel was the beginning of the end for the metal’s decade long outperformance. The seeds of a classic blow off. @puck2 caught it as it was happening:

September

Volatility launched a quest to crush mean-reversion traders. $VXX appreciated another 50% after a double before that in August. Netflix started the month at $230 per share and finished it at $115. The provider of online video streaming finished 2011 at $70, 60% below its opening print a year ago.

In September, few expected yet higher volatility. @harmongreg was one of them:

October

Some of the most powerful short-term rallies happen during bear markets. U.S. equities had their best October since 1938. Coming back from a lackluster August and September, the Nasdaq Composite gained 11%.

Steve Jobs passed away and Apple was not crushed. Some say that “Steve Jobs leaving” was already discounted by the market, but only time will tell if this was the case.

Almost everyone was sceptical on the continuation of that October 4th bounce. The market did what it does best – it surprised the majority and proceeded higher. @Gtlackey highlighted the divergence eloquently:

November

The Euro resumed its downtrend, once it became clear that both debt monetizing and further austerity measures will weaken the Union’s currency. On the bright side, vacations in Italy are cheaper today.

@ZenTrader_Phi warned for impending danger for equities due to a weakness in the Euro:

December

Cloud stocks (save Rackspace $RAX) – the last bastion of momentum, suffered a severe correction. Oracle dropped 18% and Amazon shed 10%. Speaking of Amazon, the ultimate beneficiaries of record online sales in 2011 turned out to be Visa and Mastercard. It doesn’t matter where you shop, the credit card companies are getting their cut.

@TraderFlorida was among the first to point out the breakout in $V

We hope you enjoy this quick review of the tickers that shaped 2011. Happy New Year! Wishing you an even more prosperous 2012!