Facebook Inc is set to raise up to $18.4 billion in its IPO and become the first U.S. company to be worth more than $100 billion at its debut, as investors bet on a big pop in the stock when it begins trading on the Nasdaq on Friday.

Frenzied demand, especially from individual investors hoping to buy into an Internet juggernaut that touches hundreds of millions of people every day, is expected to drive Facebook well above its initial public offering price of $38 a share, which was already at the top end of its target of $34 to $38.

“It will be bananas tomorrow [today],” said Greencrest Capital analyst Max Wolff. “This is all about the future, so it really is a lottery ticket.

“The stock could initially rise and then it could go parabolic on a wave of retail investor hope. These shares are going to trade on hope. I do not know how to value hope,” said Wolff.

Facebook is selling an up to 18 percent stake in the company at a valuation of $104 billion, comparable to the market worth of Amazon.com Inc, and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined.

The highly anticipated offering, the largest by a U.S. Internet company and the second-largest in U.S. history after Visa Inc, vaults the eight-year-old Facebook to the front ranks of corporate America.

It will give 28-year-old Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, a net worth of nearly $20 billion.

[ Details / Source: Above is our hand-picked KEY excerpt(s) from this full article: "Facebook wraps up IPO, set for big Friday pop" ]

In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover ­students. It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava [Manoj] a fortune.

His company, Living Essentials, is the biggest player by far in the ­energy-shot market, and not because 5-Hour is so delicious. Chalky cough syrup is more like it. The reason Bhargava has won is that he plays tough.

Sitting in that cemetery are a dozen or so neon copycats with names like 6-Hour Power and 8-Hour Energy. Each has been sued, bullied or kicked off the market by Living Essentials’ lawyers. In front of each are little placards with a skull and crossbones drawn in felt-tip pen. Bhargava points at the gravestone of one of his late competitors and says with a chuckle, “Rest in peace.”

The privately held Living Essentials doesn’t report revenue or profits, but a source with knowledge of its financials says the company grossed north of $600 million last year on that $1 billion at retail. 

[ Details / Source: Above is our hand-picked KEY excerpt(s) from this full article: "The Mystery Monk Making Billions With 5-Hour Energy" ]

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — At least 20 times a day, Alan Hladik walks into a fixer-upper and tries to figure out if it is worth buying.

As an inspector for the Waypoint Real Estate Group, Mr. Hladik takes about 20 minutes to walk through each home, noting worn kitchen cabinets or missing roof tiles. The blistering pace is necessary to keep up with Waypoint’s appetite: the company, which has bought about 1,200 homes since 2008 — and is now buying five to seven a day — is an early entrant in a business that some deep-pocketed investors are betting is poised to explode.

With home prices down more than a third from their peak and the market swamped with foreclosures, large investors are salivating at the opportunity to buy perhaps thousands of homes at deep discounts and fill them with tenants.

Nobody has ever tried this on such a large scale, and critics worry these new investors could [continue]…

I’m getting old.

Well, at least in internet years.

It’s getting close to 15 years now that I have been online and had a website of my own. During this time I’ve played with all kinds of different business models. Perhaps just calling them money making techniques rather than fully fledged businesses is more accurate in the majority of cases.

Nearly every technique I’ve used was designed to set myself up with what you would call a “lifestyle business”.

I didn’t realize it at the time, I thought a business was a business, but I can see now that what type of business you decide to build very much dictates what kind of life you will lead.

A lifestyle business is, as the name suggests, a business created to facilitate the kind of lifestyle you desire. In my case, and I suspect for many of the current solo-internet marketers out there, the kind of business you want is one that requires [continue]…

A lot of people, myself included, have dreams of writing a book someday and getting on the best seller list.  There’s something magical about books and I’ve been fascinated with them ever since the days when my parents first read to me as a toddler.  

I love spending hours in the library browsing up and down the aisles and pulling books off the shelves.  After a visit to the library, I often walk home with a backpack and both arms full of books on travel, cooking, science fiction, crafts, mysteries, photography, biographies, foreign languages, computer guides, or whatever else caught my eye.  (Yes I actually have hit the 50 item checkout limit on my library card before!)

With SO many books already published and new ones coming out each day, it can be extremely intimidating to write your first book, let alone even think about trying to get published.  But fear no more!  Life is too short to be scared of failing at becoming a published author, and you won’t be able to succeed unless you try first!  

Don’t let another year slip by without making some serious progress on your writing goals.  Skip the sorry excuses of writers block, procrastination, and giving up after your first rejection letter.

One Resource Is All You Need To Learn How To Get Published [continue]…

Gold bugs over the last two weeks have become even more discouraged than they were at the end of November.

And that’s saying something, since they were already quite dejected.

As a result, contrarians detect a very strong wall of worry forming in the gold market, one which could very well be the springboard for bullion rallying into new all-time high territory.

Consider the average recommended gold market exposure among a subset of the shortest-term gold market timers tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest (as measured by the Hulbert Gold Newsletter Sentiment Index, or HGNSI).

Two weeks ago, when I last wrote in this space about a contrarian analysis of gold sentiment, this average stood at 13.7%.

Today it stands at 0.3%, which means that the average gold timer is essentially keeping all of his gold-oriented portfolio out of the market.

To be sure, I reported two weeks ago that, on the basis of the HGNSI being as low as 13.7%, contrarian analysis was already bullish on gold’s prospects. And yet, far from rallying, the yellow metal since then has fallen by more than $100 per ounce. Read Nov. 30 column.

What assurances do we have that contrarian analysis will be any more successful this time around? We don’t, of course.

But it’s worth stressing that contrarian analysis is [continue]…

First up…

An excerpt from the article titled Canada: Land of opportunity?:

Developed countries have found themselves in the economic doghouse of late, saddled with debt, financial crises, and stock markets that have produced middling returns with maddening volatility. A striking exception has been Canada, where stocks have risen an average 13% a year over the last 10 years.

A hypothetical $1,000 investment in the S&P/TSX Composite Index, an index of the stock prices of the largest companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), on August 1, 2001, would have been worth $3,455 on August 31, 2011–versus only $1,305 had you invested it in the S&P 500® Index (SPX) during that same period.

Now, that link…

The companies are listed at the bottom of the page linked here…

I call it the “apple tree” loophole. I think it’s one of the best ways I know to make money in the market, especially if you don’t want to fuss over your investments every day.

But before I tell you what the loophole is, let me first tell you what it’s not…

It’s not illegal. It’s not confusing. And it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme.

When used properly, this loophole can greatly reduce the risk of losing money in any market.

But before I go on, I must say that there are a few caveats to how you use it. First, you have to follow this simple strategy exactly as I’ll outline below. Second, it only works with high-yield stocks and funds.

It all started with a simple saying I heard years ago…

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.”

That saying has stuck with me. And if you hadn’t noticed, it’s talking about a lot more than planting a couple of apple trees in your backyard and enjoying the fruit later.

The real lesson here is this: It’s the moves we make today that deliver the greatest payoff down the road.

And that’s the perfect analogy for investing in consistent [continue]…

In the meantime, if you’re not yet a paid-up Wealth Vault member (premium research), be sure to see these PREVIEWS of recent unique high-reward money-growing investment vehicles:

http://www.wealthvault.net/wealth-vault-research/

It is always interesting to see if new ETFs, in a very highly saturated marketplace, catch any attention or more importantly a sizable amount of assets.  First Trust is trying to catch the cloud computing angle, with a new ETF:

First Trust ISE Cloud Computing Index Fund (SKYY).

As long time readers know, a lot of companies we’ve been interested have seen a premium attached to them over the past 24 months or so once they become ‘cloud’ plays. But they do tend to move in a group once heralded as a ‘cloud’ company. 

More importantly, one wonders in a market with ADD if cloud matters anymore, as the lemmings have moved on to ‘social media’ as the new hot thing.

Anyhow here is a link to the ETF’s webpage, and some description below.  Looks to be 40 companies, with no one-two positions dominating the holdings as many top heavy ETFs have. 

A 0.6% expense ratio. I also have a video below with one of the salesmen from First Trust on the launch and product.

Full article…