Facebook is worth a bit less today than it was on Friday, the first day of its IPO launch. While the stock managed to stay slightly above its start price of $38 a share at the end of the day on Friday, CNBC.com reports that the company"s second day of trading on Monday saw the price go down to $34.03 a share, nearly 11 percent lower than its price on Friday. It"s also down 25 percent compared to the stock"s highest price of $45 a share, achieved early in trading on Friday.
The kicker is that Facebook, even with its loss, was still the most heavily traded stock on the NASDAQ market Monday with nearly 168 million shares trading hands. Also, the overall NASDAQ market was up 2.46 percent today, its best day of 2012 so far.
Meanwhile, the NASDAQ stock market itself its getting slammed with criticism from stock traders who feel the market was not prepared to handle the massive amount of interest and activity surrounding Facebook"s IPO launch. NASDAQ delayed the launch by 30 minutes before it allowed trading to begin and technical glitches continued throughout the day.
The Wall Street Journal reports that NASDAQ will pay up to $13 million to cover bad or faulty Facebook stock trades during Friday"s time period. However, the real trading losses could be as much as $100 million for trades made by retail and institutional investors.