It’s Friday once again, and that means it’s time for another episode of Bubblewatch ’14! This week, Facebook—itself valued at $175 billion, more than 100x trailing earnings—announced it would buy mobile-messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. NINETEEN BILLION DOLLARS. My first question was…what’s WhatsApp? I had no idea. And I’m not alone. I was watching Fast Money on CNBC (my absolute favorite show in the world) when the news broke, and four of the five people on the show had never heard of WhatsApp. That’s right—never heard of it. Turns out that WhatsApp is a 55-employee company founded in 2009 by some dude named Jan Koum. WhatsApp claims to have 400 million active users and also claims to be profitable (it’s not a public company, so who really knows?) For that, Facebook is paying $19 billion. I started reading the Facebook press release, and then I stopped reading at this Zuckerberg statement: “I’ve known Jan for a long time and I’m excited to partner with him and his team to make the world more open and connected.” I’m serious—I stopped reading. Why? Because that’s total crap. Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t known Jan Whatshisface for a long time. Mark Zuckerberg is 29 years old. He hasn’t known anyone for a long time. This is crazy. This reminds me of 2000, when JDS Uniphase (a company you’ve probably never heard of) bought SDL (a company you’ve definitely never heard of) for $41 billion. Then, in August 2001, JDS Uniphase reported a record quarterly loss of $45 billion (you read that right) when it wrote off most of the value of the SDL purchase along with the value of its earlier, $15 billion purchase of E-TEK Dynamics (who knows?). That was less than two years later. Or, as Mark Zuckerberg might say, a long time.
So…is this deal like Google’s purchase of YouTube (GOOG paid $1.6 billion in 2006 for an asset now worth at least $50 billion), or is it like JDSU’s purchase of SDL? You can guess which way I’m leaning.
The Family Stock Index eked out a half-percent gain on the week, handily beating the S&P 500 and Dow (both slightly down) and matching the gain in the bubbly Nasdaq. In truth, that headline number is misleading, as advancers and decliners were close to even and a big gain in double-weighted Nicole M. accounted for all of the index’s outperformance versus the S&P. Without Nicole and her uterean accomplice, we’d be down…but when isn’t that the case, after all?
Advancers
- Nicole M. (COLM) +7.2%. Childbirth classes? Check. Breast-feeding classes? Check. Obedience classes for Ed Winston? I sure hope so. Baby name? Beats me. The market is betting on a blockbuster, clearly. This move—and an all-time high—isn’t based on the dog.
- Zondro (ZQK) +4.7%. Speaking of dogs, I try and set the bar low in the what-a-dog-wants area. Reagan said she played tug-of-war with Zondro the other day, and that’s really all it takes for him.
- Jenny (GNE) +4.5%. Demi Lovato concert this weekend! OMG!
- Reagan (REGN) +3.4%. Reagan says OMG like it’s a word—I hate that, and it hates me. But more importantly…when you see OMG, does it make you think of OMC, the band(?) that brought us ‘How Bizarre’ all the way back in 1996? No? Well, it does now, sucka.
- Mario the Younger (MAR) +1.9%. I think I heard Katie say at one point that Mario and Nicole were considering the name ‘Roman’ for their kid. That’s third-hand information, obviously, because Katie got ‘Roman’ from Mario and I got it from a past version of myself who may or may not have heard ‘Roman.’ For all I know, the name I heard was ‘Ronan.’ Ronan the Accuser.
The bottom line is Ronan the Accuser is 100 percent what I’m destined to call Little Little Mario, however the whole name thing shakes out. It’s out of my hands, really.
Decliners
- Brinkley (BCO) -1.6%. I often feel that my son and I are locked in a grim, brutal struggle amidst the ruins of my life, much like the months-long battle between the German 6th Army and the Soviet 62nd Army in the ruins of Stalingrad during the winter of ’42-’43. In that scenario, one of us is the conscientious, cultured Field Marshal Paulus
and the other is the unrefined, unyielding General Chuikov
Don’t make me tell you who’s who.
- Lee (TGI) -3.1%. I’m Paulus, okay? Paulus loses, and I’m Paulus.
- Ruby (RJET) -2.7%. Ruby has struggled mightily this year (-17% year-to-date), and while some of that difficulty can be attributed to the impact of the nasty winter we’ve endured, the rest of the airline group hasn’t suffered nearly as badly. Reagan solved this vexing market puzzle when she noticed that ‘Ruby’ sounds a lot like ‘Rupee’—Reagan’s second and final miss in the recent district spelling bee. Coincidence? There are no coincidences in the market.
- Justin (XOXO) -4.1%. Speaking of no coincidences, last week Justin was sporting a moustache and he looked eerily like our dad—half the poundage and twice the hairage, but still, it was eerie. This week the moustache was gone. Last week XOXO was up 5.2%. This week…well, you see what happened. You can’t fight the tape, as we say in the business. You got to rehash the ‘stache, Justin.
| Name | Ticker | 2/21/2014 | Change |
| Brinkley | BCO | $31.15 | -0.51 |
| Charlotte | ICE | $212.91 | -1.94 |
| Dustin | DST | $94.08 | -0.38 |
| Icarus | FAST | $45.61 | +0.63 |
| Jenny | GNE | $11.05 | +0.48 |
| Jodi Ann | JOY | $56.73 | +0.07 |
| Josie Ann | JCOM | $48.95 | -0.11 |
| Justin | XOXO | $11.95 | -0.51 |
| Katie | CATY | $24.11 | -0.16 |
| Lee | TGI | $63.20 | -2.05 |
| Lisa | LNCE | $26.72 | -0.03 |
| Lucas | CTG | $15.99 | -0.80 |
| Lulu | LULU | $51.39 | +0.34 |
| Marcus | MCS | $13.84 | +0.21 |
| Mario T.E. | MGEE | $38.75 | +0.02 |
| Mario T.Y. | MAR | $52.51 | +0.99 |
| Namilita | NL | $11.35 | +0.03 |
| Nicole E. | NICE | $39.58 | +0.13 |
| Nicole M. | COLM | $82.54 | +5.57 |
| Reagan | REGN | $334.98 | +10.99 |
| Ruby | RJET | $8.86 | -0.25 |
| Wilson | WILC | $8.14 | +0.06 |
| Winston | ED | $55.29 | +0.13 |
| Zero | Z | $78.88 | -2.08 |
| Zondro | ZQK | $7.61 | +0.34 |
Mr. Sensitive 