Groupon is About to Run a Groupon on Itself

I know what the author is trying to say, but the way it's being said doesn't resonate with me. GRPN may fall to half its IPO price, but it won't be a half price deal, it will simply be worth less today than it was at IPO time.<p>The markets for stocks behave very differently than the markets for, say, spa treatments, in large part because nobody has commoditized spa treatments. Buying a spa treatment for half off doesn't say something about the market valuing it differently today than yesterday, it says something about the spa's marginal cost of offering a treatment during an idle time slot and price discrimination.<p>Whereas, GRPN's price says something about market segmentation alone: The folks who bought the hype have all bought the stock and now it will trade according to the expectations of the rest of the market.

Without going into the specifics of the GRPN stock, I like the meta-ness of the concept. (i.e. 'strange loop')<p>Kind of like git being developed on git [1].<p>[1] - <a href="http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=commit;h=e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290" rel="nofollow">http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=commit;h=e83c5163316f...</a>

the recent decent of the groupon stock price was imho too predictable to be true.<p>I bet there will be some rebound and short squeeze soon because 95% of the stocks are still not publicly traded and GRPN will do everything to keep the stock price near the IPO price for some time.

I get the title is a metaphor, but imagine if groupon actually did this.. continually? Today, spend $20 and get $40 in groupon credit next month.<p>Such great pyramid scheme potential right there :)

I suspect everyone that is surprised about Groupon's IPO have actually never followed one before. The IPO price is completely arbitrary, it's chosen before the stock is on the open market. It's a guess, and falling below that price doesn't have that much meaning. I thought GRPN's initial price was too high anyway