Good news all the way around for Facebook investors. Despite sluggish trading and constantly declining stock prices, today’s trading took a turn for the better. While trading started out at a record low $25.52, it actually jumped up to over $27 for a short time. The Nasdaq closed with the shares trading at $26.81.
Also adding to the bright side is Nasdaq’s $40 million they’ve set aside for investment firms who may have gotten screwed by the technical glitch which plagued trading during Facebook’s IPO launch. As you may recall, the glitch left big bank trading desks wondering who bought what and at what price.
Nasdaq says it will reimburse the firms who either couldn’t sell or couldn’t buy when the price they thought they were paying was available. The delay was only about thirty minutes, but apparently it caused enough confusion to tie up investors until after the market closed.
Nasdaq will issue the compensation in the form of cash and credits towards fees collected for trading rights on the Nasdaq market. There isn’t any word on how many firms they expected to file claims or if the planned $40 million would be enough to cover all the losses, but it sounds like the process could result in just as many lawsuits as the Facebook IPO itself, which is quite a few.
As you might recall, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the Nasdaq, and many of the deals underwriters like Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs have all found themselves facing lawsuits after the IPO launch. Not to mention the events leading up to the IPO have spurred investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wall Street Regulators, and even Congress. In fact, the Facebook IPO seems to have pissed off everybody, even Facebook users.
But, Facebook will take all the good news it can get, and rising stock prices and Nasdaq investor compensation sounds pretty good to me. As for the lawsuits, we’ll have to wait to see how they play out. My guess would be that you can’t sue someone over a bad investment anymore than you can sue the state for not buying the winning lottery ticket.
