Mark Zuckerberg is surely smiling today. Facebook’s shares have shot up about 10 percent in early-hours trading, with the lockup period for nearly 800 million FB shares expiring today.

Facebook’s stock price has seen some serious ups and downs since its IPO debut back in May. The stock debuted on the Nasdaq exchange at $38 per share but quickly fell below that just a few days after opening.

The 800 million Facebook shares that are held by employees not named Mark Zuckerberg are now eligible for sale on the open market. While you’d think that could drive the price down, the market clearly anticipated the selling of these shares. It likely has bounced because this was the last big lockup expiration, which should mean no more crazy price drops due to many employees selling at once.

As of this writing, the stock is trading at $21.95, up 10.52 percent over its close yesterday of $19.86.

Mark Zuckerberg photo via TC/Flickr

Chucking a slow-and-steady selling strategy out the window, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz sold off his remaining 5.7 million Class A shares in three separate trades between September 5 and September 7, 2012.

Moskovitz, currently the co-founder of startup Asana, broke his pattern of small 150,000-increment trades this week. By Friday, the Facebook insider had racked up an additional $108.4 million from selling shares in the company he helped create, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Since late August, Moskovitz has sold a total of 7.5 million shares for nearly $143 million in returns. By not to worry investors, Moskovitz still maintains a majority of his holdings.

The member of Facebook’s founding team still maintains 126.2 million Class B shares in the social network. The fact that he’s yet to convert those shares to Class A stock, which he’ll need to do before he can sell them on the public market, suggests that his selling activity may be at a standstill for the time being.

Facebook ended the week at $18.98 a share, which, while disappointing for a company that opened at $38 a share in May, is still a significant improvement from the $17.55 low Facebook fell to earlier in the week.

FB data by YCharts

Photo credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com

Defying the depressing trend set by Groupon and Facebook, Yelp’s share price lifted more than 22 percent today following the expiration of the company’s first lock-up period.

Roughly 53 million Yelp shares were freed for trading Wednesday as company insiders received their first crack at cashing in on the business reviews site.

From the looks of it, when given the opportunity to take their money and run, early investors and executives maintained most of their holdings. The collective vote of confidence catapulted Yelp shares to $22.37 at market close, up from $17.51 at market open. In total, 8.6 million Yelp shares were exchanged on the New York Stock Exchange today.

Michael Pachter, the managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, said that the positive activity amounted to the market’s relief that insiders didn’t dump their shares on the lockup expiration.

“The company is more disciplined than Facebook or Zynga [and] has its insiders behaving well,” Pachter told VentureBeat.

Yelp’s strong performance seems even more impressive when compared against Groupon and Facebook. Both of the consumer Internet companies were hit hard as soon as their initial lockups expired. Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first outside investor and a member of the social network’s board, sold a majority of his holdings in the company as soon as he could. Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz disposed of its entire stake in Groupon for a tiny profit.

Some of the optimism around Yelp can be attributed to a strong second quarter earnings report, which handily beat Wall Street’s expectations. In Q2, Yelp’s first full quarter since its initial listing, the company grew revenue 67 percent year-over-year and posted a smaller-than-expected loss.

YELP data by YCharts

Photo credit: Yelp/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion temporarily halted stock trading 15 minutes after the market closed today, and issued a “business update” where it admitted it will “likely have an operating loss” for its fiscal first quarter.

“RIM is going through a significant transformation as we move towards the BlackBerry 10 launch, and our financial performance will continue to be challenging for the next few quarters,” relatively new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said in the update. “The on-going competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace, and we expect our Q1 results to reflect this, and likely result in an operating loss for the quarter.”

On top of halting trading and providing an update, the company said it has hired the Royal Bank of Canada and J.P. Morgan to give the company a “strategic review.”

“To further enhance our commitment to successfully completing our transformation, after the release of our year-end financial results, we engaged J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and RBC Capital Markets to assist the Company and our Board of Directors in reviewing RIM’s business and financial performance,” Heins said. “These advisers have been tasked to help us with the strategic review we referenced on our year-end financial results conference call and to evaluate the relative merits and feasibility of various financial strategies, including opportunities to leverage the BlackBerry platform through partnerships, licensing opportunities and strategic business model alternatives.”

RIM will reveal its almost certainly bad results for Q1 of its fiscal 2013 on June 28. The company said it will issue a more detailed update on the state of the company when it reports the Q1 results in June.

Nasdaq chief exec Robert Greifeld admitted Sunday that the exchange was at fault for some glitches in early trading of Facebook’s IPO but said it had nothing to do with the stock’s uninspired performance.

Social networking service Facebook went public Friday with the largest tech IPO in history. Facebook expected trading to begin at 11 a.m. ET, but it did not begin until about 11:30 a.m. The stock did not “pop” in early trading and ended up disappointing many analysts and social media enthusiasts by closing 9.5 percent down from its $42 opening price and just barely above its $38 original IPO price.

Greifeld told a handful of reporters Sunday that the Nasdaq’s systems got backed up because there were quite a few order cancellations that came in late in the IPO process. In turn, the entire system was backed up and did not let some traders know their orders went through until after 2:30 p.m., according to the New York Times.

The New York Times reports Greifeld said the exchange was “humbly embarrassed” about the delay in confirmations, but that it was not responsible for losses incurred by trading. Charlie Gasparino at Fox Business says angry traders are demanding that Nasdaq repay them for “$100 million or possibly more.”

At the least, the SEC plans to look into the Nasdaq trading debacle.

Read more about Facebook:

• Facebook hit with $15B class-action suit over user privacy
• Would Facebook’s IPO have been bigger if it went with New York Stock Exchange?
• Do not despair: Facebook revenue — and its share price — are just at the beginning
• Facebook sets $38 share price for largest tech IPO in U.S. history
• Facebook’s all-night hackathon kicks off with standing ovation for CEO
• Facebook’s world takeover by the numbers

Wall Street gave Yelp a less-than-perfect review on its second day of trading. The company’s stock slipped more than 14 percent Monday with shares closing at $20.99.

Yelp made a stellar, five-star debut on the New York Stock Exchange Friday. The business and local reviews site, which has around 66 million monthly unique visitors, saw shares skyrocket 63 percent from $15 to $24.52 on opening day. Today’s dip, however, suggests that the pomp-and-circumstance could be fading quickly.

“Yelp’s price action so far certainly reminds me of Groupon’s post IPO price action,” financial expert and PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh told VentureBeat. “We think Yelp’s stock price will continue to fall as (with Groupon) IPO investors who aren’t locked up sell and ‘hit bids’ from small retail investors, punishing the stock price.”

Yelp grew revenue 74 percent to $83.3 million in 2011, but lost $16.7 million during the same period. The company’s continued losses and minuscule revenue figures make it an especially risky bet, though investors were eager to at least temporarily jump on the bandwagon for Friday’s public debut.

“I wouldn’t want to have been the person who bought Groupon stock on the first day of trading at $31 [Groupon is now trading at $18]. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one who bought Yelp at $26 on Friday,” Hamadeh said, adding that both companies rely too heavily on sales employees for growth. “Both have ended and will end badly.”

Yelp’s stock has been up and down in after-hours trading Monday, recovering by as much as 8 percent. At $20.99 a share, Yelp has a market cap of $1.26 billion.

Photo credit: KayOne73/Flickr

The service is similar to the stock trading tools offered online by Google and Yahoo, but features a some extra technical tools. The software keeps track of around 48,000 companies’ financial information, which range from net income to the number of employees they have. The idea is to match the same kind of information and tools that professional traders get from very expensive trading services like those offered by Bloomberg’s terminals.

Screener.co isn’t designed to give advice about what companies to invest in — just present the information, like other trading tools do, said co-founder Lenny Grover. It’s a lot cheaper than most trading services today — it costs $24.95 a month, compared to the thousands of dollars that terminals or advanced trading software can cost.

But Screener.co did seem mercilessly complicated with a massive number of advanced options for tracking equities and company performance, with no tutorials in sight. The interface was too complex and that would end up hurting the company’s chances of finding investors and potential customers, said Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer.

“You’re targeting the prosumer, not the consumer, and the prosumer is almost impossible to find,” Patzer said. “The way to go in this market is not more complex, it’s simpler.”

The company is targeting casual traders — the 14 percent of households that have invested anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million in public stocks, Grover said. A fifth of those traders don’t employ a financial adviser through companies like Charles Schwab, and just do the trading on their own using services like Google and Yahoo Finance. The site is also in a free public beta until April 1.