Facebook早已悄然完成实质性上市

    2月1日，Facebook终于向美国证券交易委员会（SEC）递交了正式的S-1文件，朝着第二季度首次公开募股（IPO）的目标迈出了第一步。虽然市场普遍对此早有心理准备，但财经媒体却完完全全为之陷入了集体疯狂。整整一个礼拜，Facebook成为了电视、广播、网络和报纸的唯一话题。

    但所有报道都忽视了一件事，即Facebook很早以前就完成了事实上的IPO。是的，Facebook早就上市了，只是普通投资者没有收到邀请罢了。

    曾几何时，上市是一件值得骄傲的事，是一种特权。一家公司要不知疲倦地努力多年，才能达到这一目标。一旦机会出现，它就会紧紧抓住，既不会端架子，也不会在投行家首次登门拜访时断然回绝。但出现这种局面的原因是因为，当年上市公司仍然拥有很多非上市公司梦寐以求的一些优势，包括华尔街分析人士的跟踪关注、获得融资渠道、建立广泛多样的股东基础等等……我是不是提到了获得融资渠道这一点？

    但证券交易所不愿光为会员牟利。它们决定开始追求利润，放任反竞争行为和破坏性的（但出手阔绰的）新“客户”通过算法代码吸走每日交易的所有能量。随着价差从每股的几分之一，到十分之一，乃至百分之一，股票做市利润率也逐渐消失于无形。这种现象导致做市商和特设交易商（specialist）的彻底消失，雇佣分析师研究所交易股票的经纪公司也随之大量消亡。

    最终的结果是，公司就算上市，也要努力赢得分析师的关注，它们的股票交易由机器摆布，还会遭遇指数ETF选股篮的调整而引发的波动。围绕上市公司信息披露的监管规定繁琐无比，要求公司必须及时准确地向公众股东披露信息，但公司必须为此支付高昂的费用。于是，它们开始三缄其口，只提供经律师审核过的、最简要的业务更新信息，披露次数也尽可能减少。

    由于我们的公开市场如此令人失望，像Facebook这样机智聪明的公司找到了一个变通方法，可以避免这样有名无实的IPO，悄悄地筹集资本，建立股东基础。事实上，Facebook根本就是因为美国证券交易委员会有关股东超过500人的公司必须上市的规定，才不得不最终提交了上市申请。

    今天尚未IPO的Facebook与其他任何真正在证券交易所上市的公司相比，几乎没有什么大的区别。Facebook在不同的阶段进行了无数轮的风险融资活动，如今已经拥有几十亿美元的资本。由于投资者高盛（Goldman Sachs）和数字天空技术合伙公司（DST Partners）这些公司自身就有投资者资本注入，Facebook事实上拥有了几千股东。公司每份公告都获得了金融媒体连篇累牍的报道，众多非专业和专业的分析师们根据扎克伯格的片言只语建立起Facebook财务模型。

    On February 1, Facebook at long last filed its official S-1 document with the SEC, the first step toward an initial public offering (IPO) the company expects to do in the second quarter of this year. Despite the fact that it was widely anticipated, the financial media went absolutely bananas. Facebook was the only subject on television, the radio, the web and in the paper. For a week.

    But lost in all of this saliva-covered enthusiasm was the fact that Facebook's de facto IPO had already occurred a long time ago. Yes, Facebook already went public, you just weren't invited.

    Once upon a time it was both an honor and a privilege to go public. A company worked tirelessly for years just to get to that point and it leapt at the opportunity to do so rather than playing it cool or blowing off bankers when they first came calling. But this was back when being public had benefits that a private company could only dream of -- research coverage by Wall Street analysts, access to capital, the ability to cultivate a wide and diverse shareholder base...and did I mention access to capital?

    But the exchanges were unhappy with being institutions solely for the benefit for their members. They decided to go for-profit and allow anti-competitive behavior and destructive (but high-paying) new "customers" to suck all the life out of each day's trading with algorithmic codes. As spreads went from fractions of a share to decimals and then decimals of decimals, the profit margin for making markets in stocks gradually disappeared as well. This led to a annihilation of the market makers and specialists as well as decimation of the brokerage houses that employed analysts to cover the stocks that they traded in.

    The end result is that companies come public and struggle for analyst coverage, their shares are whipped about by robot traders and the whims of whatever index ETF basket they happen to be assigned to. The regulation surrounding the reporting of accurate and timely information to their public shareholders has become so onerous and expensive that they've essentially clammed up, offering only the most terse and lawyer-approved updates on their business as infrequently as they can.

    And because of this woeful state of our public markets, resourceful and clever companies like Facebook have found a workaround giving them the ability to avoid the big, bad IPO in name only while quietly amassing both capital and a shareholder base. Facebook was essentially forced into going public by SEC rules for companies with more than 500 shareholders.

    A comparison between Facebook today, pre-IPO, and almost any other company that is actually public on an exchange yields very little in the way of major differences. Facebook has billions in capital, owing to the umpteen rounds of money-raising at various levels of the venture capitalism sequence. It has thousands of shareholders by virtue of the fact that it has taken money from firms like Goldman Sachs (GS) and DST Partners who themselves have investor capital plugged in. It has the financial press hyperventilating over their every pronouncement as well as a cottage industry of amateur and professional analysts modeling the company's financials based on any scrap of knowledge that should shake loose from Zuckerberg's pockets.