A Hedge Funder Who Bet $100 Million On The Facebook IPO Just Called And Boy Was He Furious

by Nicholas Carlson

We just got off the phone with a hedge fund manager who says his fund owns Facebookstock “in excess of a $100 million.”

The fund bought the stock Friday, after the IPO.

This source spoke to us because he is very angry about the Facebook IPO—particularly the way NASDAQ has handled it.

His allegations/claims/opinions:

NASDAQ knew its systems were broken before the Facebook IPO, and instead of aborting the offering and facing huge embarrassment, it went ahead. Traders then lost hundreds of millions of dollars as they tried to buy and sell Facebook stock without getting confirmation that their trades had been executed.
NASDAQ made the problem worse on Monday. NASDAQ told traders who thought they had sold their Facebook stock on Friday—but had actually not—to fill out a form by noon. This form asked traders to list the price at which they thought they had sold their stock and the price at which they actually had. Problem was: Many of these traders had not yet actually sold their stock. Because the form required an actual selling price, many did, dumping tens of millions of shares of Facebook stock on the market, and sending the stock price plummeting.