US equities markets closed the week with the highly anticipated Alibaba IPO - and the results did not disappoint

US equities markets closed the week with the highly anticipated Alibaba IPO - and the results did not disappoint. BABA climbed 38% on Friday to finish the day with a market cap of $231 billion. That makes BABA the 9th most valuable company in the S&P 500 and bigger than Amazon and eBay combined! Keep in mind, Alibaba handles something like 80% of e-commerce in China, so there's some legitimacy to the valuation. On the other hand, BABA generates about $9 billion in revenue compared to $82 billion for AMZN - so is it really fair to compare? Consider this, AMZN keeps only about a penny of profit per dollar in revenue, while BABA keeps a whopping $0.43 per dollar. Definitely not a clear cut comparison. The biggest winner here may be Yahoo, which had a 22.5% stake in BABA before the IPO.