Cancelled my offer for Vonage IPO

Andy Kessler made me do it.

When a former hedge fund says the Vonage IPO is in trouble, I have to listen.  Kessler calls Skype's move offering free North American telephone calls, "a classic high stakes Wall Street sucker punch," designed to damage Vonage's public stock offering. 

"EBay (Skype's owner)  knows this," Kessler wrote on Om Malik's blog, "Why not toy with the mouse before you kill it."  The value of Vonage's service has just fallen to $0, he said.

Kessler's a smart guy.

Disclaimer: At the time of this posting, I owned shares of EBay.

Comments

[BQ]

Skype, though free, sucks! The sound quality is awful - even with high-end headsets. I have SunRocket, and own no shares in it. This VoIP service is only $16/month, call free anywhere in US, Canada, and some other N. American places. So, that puts it $10 under the monthly cost of Vonage. If your calling overseas for long periods - Skype is the way to go, but if your calls are in the US - drop the local phone service and use VoIP for your calls.

[SJS]

Thanks for canceling - now maybe the smart ones that don't believe an idiot like Kessler will have a few more shares to make $$ off thanks to your naivety. I'm not sure if Kessler was included, but there was a lot of negative press around Google too when it first debuted. Kessler freely admits in his Wall St. Meat that he knows little about finances and was a tech guy coming in to the business. No offense but his Hedge Fund abilities don't seem too great from what I've read. Anyway to each his own - but in Kessler's comments he implies that Ebay is brilliant - ok? So if Ebay is Brilliant for paying over $2bill for Skype which has only $24mil in revenues, an interface system for techies only, and can't market to mainstream telephone users - then that makes me stupid for paying the same $$ for Vonage - which did $124 mil in revs LAST QUARTER??!!! VG has a product that can be set up by a blind man - and they market like they own Madison Avenue. So again Thanks for being a gullible guy that will inevitably make it much easier for those that, like with the Google IPO, don't believe everything they hear from the jealous and ill-informed media. However as a blogger you should also disclaim that you really don't know valuation methods and that Kessler, an over-rated ear-tickling author, has a poor track record for you to believe any financicial advice he so freely offers.