The Week Ahead: A lift from Lyft's listing?

A unicorn comes to Wall Street in the week ahead.

Riding sharing company Lyft is expected to list its stock on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange beginning Friday morning. It may be the second-largest transportation network firm behind Uber, but it would become the first to the public market.

If Lyft is as successful as expected at selling its stock to the public, the company will be worth as much as Hershey _ about $23 billion. Not bad for a firm that lost almost $1 billion last year. Lyft has been growing fast, though. In the U.S. barely one in every five ridesharing trips were taken through Lyft in 2016. Two years later, as the market grew, Lyft was carrying more than one in every three rides.

Investors take note, here; these figures, while included in the company's federal regulatory filing, come from an Internet market research firm that owns more than 5 percent of Lyft. Do you think an early investor has an incentive to make the company look good?

Lyft doesn't really need the public investors' money. At the end of last year, Lyft had about $2 billion in the bank. In Lyft's regulatory filing ahead of its public stock sale, it says its cash "will be sufficient" for this year. A lot of the stock that will be sold to the public won't give the new company owners much say the business, either. Most of the "super-shares" that come with more voting power will remain in the hands of insiders.

The early investors in these companies, though, do want the public's investment dollars because they likely will sell, turning a profit on their investment. That's their reward for taking the risk early on, and good for them.

There is no guarantee Lyft's ride as a public company will be smooth. Facebook stock lost 31 percent during its first year of public trading. Shares of Twitter still trade below their first publicly traded price more than five years later. Google stock almost tripled in its first year trading, but it also was profitable before it went public.

Whether or not investors hail shares of Lyft, they should separate out the hype.