An IPO (or initial public offering) is when a company goes public by offering shares of their company for sale on a stock index. Those that have been trading for a while will remember a time in the late 90s when a company could soar after an IPO on nothing more than hopes and wishes; so long as it was a tech company.

The future looked great until the “dot bomb” when just about everything fell and a lot of people got burned. Today we are experiencing somewhat of a replay of this, with companies like Zynga, Pandora and others going public. But most people are patiently awaiting the Granddaddy of them all, Facebook.

IPO Could be Q2 2012

Now sources are saying that Facebook is going to have its IPO rather soon, possibly within the second quarter of this year. There have been several sources that are all pointing to the same thing: that Facebook is gearing up for an IPO in the 3rd week of May. Before a firm goes public, it has to file some documentation with the Security and Exchange Commissions to get the go-ahead for their IPO. This is something that Facebook has yet to do.

If Facebook is going to go public, they are going to want to file these documents soon as the review process can take a while.Filing these documents with the SEC is not something that Facebook can do in secrecy, so once they are publicly filed, then that will be the formal announcement that Facebook is planning on going public; probably within the next 5 or so months.

The obvious question here is going to be what will Facebook open at? Since it is a private firm there is only speculation as to Facebook’s valuation, but figures around $100 billion are not out of the question here, so this will not be a budget tech stock even from the start.