Facebook of weed aims to get listed on Nasdaq

MassRoots, the so-called Facebook of pot, has reapplied for a listing on Nasdaq in hopes of raising fresh cash.

If successful, MassRoots will be the exchange’s first initial public offering by a US company in the cannabis industry.

Denver-based MassRoots has been trading over-the-counter as a “penny stock” since April 2015 and initially applied for a Nasdaq listing last September.

But it was turned down for lack of an underwriter, a spokesman said. MassRoots has since retained Charden Capital Markets to underwrite the sale of up to $6.5 million in shares and warrants.

High on the IPO’s potential, investors sent MassRoots’ stock up 22.7 percent Monday to close at $1.54 per share.

Nasdaq wouldn’t address MassRoots’ acceptance chances, saying it doesn’t comment on companies in the listing process.

MassRoots bills itself as “a social network for the cannabis community” – a network that has grown to 775,000 users in just three years.

Much of the growth reflects the reluctance of stoners to discuss cannabis consumption on mainstream social media, where family, colleagues and authorities might not look so kindly on toke talk.

Cannabis remains illegal under federal law, although 23 states allow some degree of medical marijuana use, and four of those allow legal adult use. MassRoots predicted 14 states will pass adult-use laws and two states will pass medical-use laws within five years.

MassRoots reported revenue for last year of $213,963 —mostly from advertising by dispensaries, which are barred from Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Wall Street’s down numbers put CEOs pay packages on watch

The biggest banks, starting with JPMorgan Chase Wednesday, are expected to report double-digit drops in revenue due to an unusually bad quarter for trading, which can make for some awkward timing for chief executives who want to get their pay packages approved at upcoming annual meetings.

“If banks don’t perform well, [executives] shouldn’t get paid as much,” Mike Mayo, bank analyst at CLSA, who has been critical of CEO pay, told The Post.

Michael Corbat, Citigroup’s CEO, and Brian Moynihan, of Bank of America, are vulnerable to “say on pay” votes this year as investors start campaigning for more executive accountability.

Citi’s stock was down 4.36 percent last year, and fell another 19.3 percent during the first quarter this year. BofA fell 5.9 percent in 2015, and slumped an additional 19.7 percent during the first three months of 2016.

“Citigroup has a very nice scorecard for evaluating executive compensation, but we see a degree of grade inflation,” Mayo said.

Last year, Citi and BofA both cut their CEOs’ pay to $13 million. Citi’s board wants to give Corbat a 27 percent pay raise to $16.5 million for his work in 2015. BofA thinks Moynihan should get $16 million.

University Rankings 2015/16 : Top 50

The primary aim is to help students make informed comparisons of leading universities around the world.    Based on six performance indicators, the rankings are designed to assess universities in four areas: research, teaching, employability and internationalization.

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 2   Harvard University 3   University of Cambridge 3   Stanford University 5 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) 6   University of Oxford 7 UCL (University College London) 8 Imperial College London 9 ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology 10 University of Chicago 11 Princeton University 12 National University of Singapore (NUS) 13 Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) 14 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) 15 Yale University 16 Johns Hopkins University 17 Cornell University 18 University of Pennsylvania 19 King's College London 19 The Australian National University 21 The University of Edinburgh 22 Columbia University 23 Ecole normale supérieure, Paris 24 McGill University 25 Tsinghua University 26 University of California, Berkeley (UCB) 27 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 28 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 29 Duke University 30 The University of Hong Kong 30 University of Michigan 32 Northwestern University 33 The University of Manchester 34 University of Toronto 35 London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) 36   Seoul National University 37 University of Bristol 38 Kyoto University 39 The University of Tokyo 40 Ecole Polytechnique 41 Peking University 42 The University of Melbourne 43 KAIST - Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology 44 University of California, San Diego (UCSD) 45 The University of Sydney 46 The University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia) 46 The University of Queensland 48 The University of Warwick 49 Brown University 50 University of British Columbia