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What Caused the Problems With the Facebook iPO?

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  • Description

    FBN’s Gerri Willis on the problems investors had on Facebook’s first day of trading.

  • Duration 3:51
  • Date

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-- securities regulator Mary Schapiro had a message today for small investors stung by the FaceBook IPO.

In spite of the problems with the social networks public stock watch you should be confident in the markets.

But it's too late they've already -- competency IPO that was supposed to take the market by storm and reignite small investor interest in stocks.

Well it -- just the opposite.

Small investors are complaining.

They -- -- -- from confirming trades or trade cancellations.

Ordered a buy and sell that normally take two seconds took two hours and even longer.

People who bought are angry those that didn't -- shrugging their shoulders and say I told you so.

One investor commented to the Wall Street Journal I was stuck for six hours trying to confirm whether I owned this dog or not.

What was going on behind the scenes according to reports is that NASDAQ system took an extra two milliseconds to calculate the FaceBook shares opening price.

In the meantime the system was trying to process orders and that resulted in NASDAQ having to manually override the system.

An override which took twenty minutes.

One simple glitch in the middle of a massive public stock offering gets magnified.

There is no room for -- Now that's the official explanation but we talk to those in the marketplace and what's going on -- -- a lot of finger pointing.

NASDAQ says they fix the problem that caused the delay in that it won't happening yet.

After the order confirmations that are still pending all NASDAQ will say -- -- after clearing up the unintended consequences of their pricing system.

They clear that backlog about standing orders and cancellations.

At 1:50 PM Friday afternoon now the implication.

What -- delays people -- pat since then must be at the broker dealer in.

Online brokers over their part say the fault was with NASDAQ and market makers.

Scott -- for example says nasdaq's issues cause their customer orders to be delayed.

Which in turn cause some of those investors to try to change or modify their order.

And that put in place a cascade of errors.

Scott trade told the Willis report that the company is staffed up to deal with questions even before problems -- rose.

Across its 505 branch offices its national service manner and even on FaceBook and Twitter.

When it was clear big problems that occurred the company -- trading services team working throughout the weekend to manually processed several thousand transactions.

Can you imagine.

Now some of these brokerages managed to turn -- to their advantage Scott trade opened 431%.

More new accounts Friday in a typical day in the day's trading volumes were up 70% vs the monthly average.

-- spoke to us as well saying quote Fidelity continues to deal with the aftermath of Friday's market issues -- delayed processing borders for FaceBook.

As they did Friday and yesterday Fidelity systems continue to operate normally.

And fortunately our clients continue to feel the effects of these issues in some cases were working aggressively to address them.

-- rate declined to comment to us.

So far at least one investor has already filed a lawsuit against net debt alleging negligence.

If you've been impacted the right thing to do is contact your broker pronto even an online broker register what they -- a dispute.

You don't even need to have details of your trade on hand because the brokerage we'll have -- in their computer system.

Any reimbursement will come from the brokerage but -- -- -- NASDAQ will be on the hook.

Frankly I hate see this kind of trouble for small investors we need a system in place the treats everybody fairly.

Not just the deep pocketed investors looking to cash out of their investments.

The market needs small investors and small investors need an even playing field in the stock market in order to fill their own financial goals.

Fix the problem do it fast.

Look ultimately it's in everybody's interest for the markets to work efficiently.

Openly and fair.

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