The Burning Effect of Yelp (YELP)

Yelp Inc. (NYSE: YELP) is now challenging the $20.00 mark.  After pricing a premium IPO at $15 and trading as high as $26, Yelp is beginning to resemble yet one more example of a hot internet property IPO that was priced too richly after the open.  In all fairness, the $15 price gave an implied value of $900 million or so.  That was not insurmountable, but at $24 and $25 this one has managed to do what market conspiracy theorists like to say… “The market often acts to cause the most pain to the most number of investors.”  So, did the underwriters and market makers get greedy here on the after-market action of the IPO?  It would appear so.  The float is small enough here that getting a lot of volume is not easy, and the entire class of shares that came public has such a small voting right that there will be no shareholder votes on anything worth mentioning.

At last look (9:55 AM EST) Yelp shares were down another 4.7% at $19.99 and the range on the day is $19.36 to $20.22 on just over 400,000 shares.

Another hot IPO which burned investors who chased it… If this keeps happening where social media and internet properties keep coming public with low floats followed by poor after-market performance, investors are going to start giving up on the latest of the dot-com properties unless they can get shares for a quick flip at the IPO.

JON C. OGG