Nasdaq red-faced after software snafu stalls Facebook IPO

So is it investing in a company

if you buy shares and then sell them in under a minute (never mind a day)? I was under the impression that was what the stock market was for - adding liquidity to a company based on it's shares.

I'm all for trading but in those kind of spans (milliseconds) - you are just in it for the margin - no investment.

Whenever bugs are in the System, and they are, who knows what will happen when you feed them?!.

Here is another take upon the Facebook problem, which y'all here will know to be perfectly true ....... but every cloud has a silver lining .... [with some studded in diamonds for a chosen few? :-)

<blockquote>amanfromMars May 20, 2012, 21:27 ….. commenting on a comment on http://rt.com/usa/news/facebook-ipo-globe-internet-644/

Sentinel (unregistered) wrote in #16 …….

Facebook will not go the way of the Globe. Washington intends to use it to control the denizens of planet Earth – whether they are Russians, Chinese, New Guineans, Congolese, or Amazonian native Indians. Everyone’s profile will be on Facebook for the CIA and Pentagon and other U.S. agencis to monitor and control. Recall how the Washington controlled mass medias so avidly promoted this social media as the promoted Google.

Have you any idea how easy it is for the likes of Russian, or Chinese, or European intelligence agencies, [to name but just three systems] to post whatever they want the CIA and Pentagon and other US agencies to monitor and control/react to?

And that would have the former parties [Russian, or Chinese, or European intelligence agencies] leading the latter parties [CIA and Pentagon and other US agencies] and have them chasing all manner of phantom ghost and disappearing trail imaginable, lest they actually be stealthily true and virtually real too.

Welcome to the Great IntelAIgents Game …… which given what we know about President Vladimir Putin’s earlier training, would seem to make him something of a natural leader in the field? Or somebody who would more easily understand natural leaders in the field. </blockquote>

Pop!

With the current economic climes, this was hardly the best time for an IPO of this size.

Does anyone who shelled out for FB shares actually understand that the value of their holding can go to zero in a matter of days?

When it comes to Facebook, you just can't polish a turd - there are no malfunctions today but the stock is still down.

Not at the races

So, the biggest IPO in history was blighted by a system malfunction characterised as a ‘race condition’ because of the huge interest the Facebook IPO was generating among traders. This clearly brings to the fore the importance of knowing how much strain your critical systems are under at any one time. The interest in the Facebook IPO was hardly surprising, but such peaks and troughs in demand on a system and its applications are often far less predictable without the proper monitors.

Through the execution of synthetic transactions and active polling in real time, one can capture key performance and process related information, meaning that problems such as this could have been identified and alerted upon before they become an issue that was felt, and reported on in this case, across the globe.

"Some are blaming the technical problems for the poor performance of Facebook shares on Friday"

Heh. Yeah surely it's not because the stock is overvalued.

"With the current economic climes, this was hardly the best time for an IPO of this size."

True. But, also, the stock is VASTLY overvalued. When I took some econ classes in the late 1990s, a P/E (Price to Earnings ratio) above 8 was considered excessively overvalued. That is, if your company earned $100,000,000 a year, the market cap (total value of all shares of stock) should be at $800,000,000 or less or else don't be surprised if the stock price drops. While I was taking the class, even the econ professors didn't notice the obvious bubble of the time, and just informed us the book was out of date and that number is really about 15 P/E instead. I've read Facebook made about $3 billion in ad revenue, this puts Facebook's IPO valuation at over 33 P/E ratio. So, fair market price for Facebook's stock should be more like $9 a share using the "traditional" P/E limit of 8, and still only about $18 a share using the 15 P/E figure.