A Fool Looks Back

It's finally happening. Facebook is going public. The leading social-networking website filed to go public on Wednesday.

As investors probably imagined, Facebook is a ridiculously profitable company given its lean overhead and enviable model where the users are the ones creating the content. Facebook earned $1 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue last year. There are 845 million monthly active users.

Facebook will trade under the ticker symbol FB in a few weeks if everything goes according to plan. Then again, this is Wall Street. Nothing ever really goes as planned.

Briefly in the news
And now let's take a quick look at some of the other stories that shaped our week.

• Dice Holdings (NYSE: DHX  ) fell 17% on Thursday after offering up light guidance for 2012. The operator of career-specific websites did post strong fourth-quarter results, but investors are always worried about the future. Snake eyes?
• Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX  ) took a breather after U.K. satellite television giant BSkyB announced that it will roll out a rival streaming video service. Maybe Netflix should've gone for an expansion market that would have given it a little more leg room. The BSkyB's the limit!
• Walgreen (NYSE: WAG  ) posted a 4.6% decline in comps for January. A weak flu season and a sharp drop in prescriptions are the culprits, so I guess the good news is that we're feeling better and getting medicated elsewhere.
• Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI  ) is staging a Bruce Springsteen show to celebrate 10 years of satellite radio. The Boss hasn't had a marketable hit in that time, but when life gives you a terrestrial-radio icon, you make satellite-radio lemonade.
• Shuttefly (Nasdaq: SFLY  ) came through with solid holiday-quarter results, but that snapshot wasn't enough to offset the ugly moving picture in the form of weak near-term guidance.

Until next week, I remain,

Rick Munarriz

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