

Facebook’s Debut Marred by Trading Glitches - jamgraham
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/facebooks-debut-marred-by-trading-glitches/

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paperwork
I was at a trading desk today, there really were issues at Nasdaq. I've never
seen such fury and never heard such obscenities. Traders didn't know what
their positions were and those who did know of their positions, couldn't be
sure of the price they received.

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ChuckMcM
So, any guesses what these weird after-hours spikes @$42 are?
<http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB>

See the peaks at 4:24, 4:52, 5:10PM pacific? Nearly a million shares changing
hands after hours >10% above the official closing price for the day? That is
some strange stuff on IPO day.

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paperwork
Good question. Looks interesting, unfortunately I have no idea.

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snprbob86
Despite witnessing countless "enterprise" systems built out of bubble gum and
popsicle sticks, I still have a hard time believing that Nasdaq really
couldn't handle this technically... I'm not sure what to make of this.

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DanBC
82 million trades for FB in the first 30 seconds.

I have no idea if that's a lot or not, but it's pretty impressive to build a
system capable of doing that.

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coyled
As a point of comparison, NASDAQ handled trades for 750 million shares in 1.1
seconds for last year's Russell Reconstitution[1], one of the busiest equity
trading days of the year.

[1] --
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Indexes#Annual_reconsti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Indexes#Annual_reconstitution)

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cma
Trading systems are trivially shardable by symbol or letter range; not so much
help for a single symbol as in the case of an IPO.

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moocow01
I don't have insight into it but this sounds to me like the underwriters
making excuses for a "poor performing" IPO.

I have no idea which way FB will head on Monday but am pretty sceptical that
this is at all relevant to their 1st day performance. I wouldn't base optimism
specifically on the viewpoint

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lincolnq
I had a limit buy order at $45 which I placed at 11am (when it opened) which
was never filled (and should have been, as the price never went above $43 or
so). There were definite trading glitches, and if they were skewed on the buy
side, that could definitely have affected the price.

EDIT: Actually, the order did go through (annoyingly, at $42). The delay was
just in the reporting. So never mind.

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veyron
What I've heard (from a friend at MS) is that the initial delay was due to the
underwriters convincing larger funds not to just dump all their shares at the
open ...

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donall
Can you provide more detail about your source?

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veyron
Friend works for MS. (updated parent)

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ComputerGuru
Maybe I'm being _really_ thick here, but what does MS have to do with this?

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veyron
Sorry about that, but 'MS' = Morgan Stanley.

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ComputerGuru
Ah, of course. In my line of work 999 times out of a 1000, MS is Microsoft ;-)

The other 0.1% would be multiple sclerosis.

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xpose2000
Something was definitely broke, as I was watching stocktwits to see what
people were saying about Facebook. I saw at least 3 or 4 people saying that
their orders were not being confirmed and still listed as pending. One was
using scottrade I believe.

However, I was able to purchase stock just fine via tdameritrade.

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seldo
So does anyone think that on Monday if Nasdaq stays more stable, Facebook's
stock will do better?

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faramarz
I think that's exactly why Facebook announced the Karma acquisition after
markets closed Today. Since there won't be any underwriter protection to keep
the price at above $38 on Monday, I believe Facebook timely released the
acquisition news to open Monday in favorable terms.

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ArchD
Given the skepticism about the Instagram acquisition, the Karma acquisition
could be interpreted either positively or negatively by different investors,
couldn't it?

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OzzyB
Today was a Friday.

Markets usually sell off on the last day of the week before heading into the
weekend; i.e. traders don't (usually) like holding positions for two days more
than they have to.

I think it's important to factor this into any discussion of Facebook's
trading debut.

I personally would be waiting to see who things fair next week/monday.

[addendum] I'm quite surprised the IPO was set for a Friday because of this.

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samstave
I almost think this was intentional. I think that Zuck has extremely savvy
advisors. And I think he is rather shrewd himself.

I would not be surprised it this thing triples next week.

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jrockway
What good does that do?

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roycyang
I, for better or worse, decided to invest some of my dollars in Facebook. Like
many others, I received radio silence about my trade. At EOD, I got a call
from my brokerage, Fidelity, apologizing about the trading issues and offered
to cancel my trades. They were going to absorb the costs to make me happy...
And I didn't even complain. I was on the fence about canceling my order but
that was besides the point, for me Fidelity just secured a lifelong customer
and now, apparently a Fidelity evangelist!

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gavanwoolery
_puts on tinfoil hat_

Trading "glitch", or engineered opportunity? Any smart person can make a small
fortune off of a delta. As I always say, if there is a way to make money,
somebody, somewhere, is going to figure out how to do it.

