If the entire world goes full retard, is any individual instance of full retardedness unique? This is what today's IPO bomb, Ruckus, which despite (or probably due to) much praise and lauding from CNBC's Bob Pisani, bombed 20% on its first day of trading, is hoping for. The company which picked the wrong time and wrong place to go public and thus, to realize first hand that the US stock market has for years not been a market in any normal sense of the word, but merely a HFT-manipulated policy vehicle for the central planners, decided to pull ye olde scapegoating trick, and blamed it on, cerebral hemorrhage spoiler alert, Hurricane Sandy.
From the WSJ:
[RKUS] has been among the more closely followed public offerings this winter. The San Francisco-based company aims to improve spotty commercial wi-fi coverage for customers such as Time Warner Cable TWC -0.37%, and sports for the first nine months of this year a top-line revenue growth rate of 91% so far this year, compared to last year, according to its prospectus.
But during the critical road show phase of an IPO, when a company is shopped around to potential institutional investors, its executives had their plans interrupted by Superstorm Sandy, which pushed the deal back a week, according to Selina Lo, Ruckus’s chief executive.
Had the deal come a week or two earlier, it may have avoided some of the broader market turbulence that has helped drive its stock down in the first day of trading.
Stock have tumbled since the election, and Ruckus’ IPO “certainly was impacted by the macro environment,” Ms. Lo said. “Some investors were preoccupied.”
“A number of companies this week have pulled back, but we decided to go because there was a lot of investor interest,” said Ms. Lo.
It turns out there wasn't. But who is to say an executive is at fault for taking a horrible executive level decision. Nobody, that's who.
What is more relevant is if corporate success or failure now depends solely on what phase moon is in, the direction the wind is blowing, and who won Ohio, maybe it is time to stop pretending the market is a market, stop pretending that this time it's different and a centrally-planned market can possibly work 100% historical failure rate notwithstanding, and just shut it all down and call it a day.
But in the meantime, why take responsibility for anything - just do what the US government itself is now doing with every worse and worse data point, and blame it all on a regional storm. Surely, the company's shareholder team will be delighted with this explanation and do nothing to shorten Ms. Lo executive career. Because after all, when other people's money is at stake, who really cares.