How many shares of Facebook am I going to purchase?

Today is the day Facebook officially goes public. The initial stock price is set at $38/share. And because I am in the technology field I have been peppered with questions from people I know asking me how many shares I am going to purchase for myself.

The answer is simple—zero. Now I wish I could say I am a Nostradamus and perfectly predicted what would happen on opening day but the truth is I am writing this blog post after the market has already closed today. Things just got a little busy and I never got around to officially posting this on the website. And now I have to edit it. Great.

But the simple matter remains, I wasn’t planning on buying any Facebook stock today and I held true to my word and didn’t buy any. Good thing too because today wasn’t exactly a barn burner of a day for Facebook stock. I don’t know the exact closing price but I do know that the stock price didn’t move much (maybe 9 cents?) from where is started.

But I was tempted

Funny thing is, I was tempted to buy. Not because I thought it was a good investment, but rather because I was going to ride the wave for a few days (even hours if I had to) and just make a quick buck when all of the Facebook worshipers poured their money into the stock. Remember when people were buying the first generation iPhones for $800 and selling them the next day for $2,000? Yeah, I kind of felt like doing that.

But in the end, I decided to play it safe and just wait to see what happened. Once again, whew!

So what’s my future prediction for Facebook’s stock price? That ones easy. I am 100% positive that on any given trading the day the price will fluctuate both up and down.

How’s that for Nostradamus?