Facebook down 18%, Fingers pointing and clutching at straws

Watching the stock fall, and the fall out from the Facebook IPO Fiasco has been very entertaining, in that never have I seen so many vested (or would that be invested) interests hoisted on such sky high petards:

1. The "IPO was wonderful" lobby were shut up after Monday morning trading. If it looks like a Turkey.... (In fact now we are seeing the opposite, as everyone lines up to say they knew it was all way overpriced all along. Did they hell, we felt positively alone saying that before the last few days )

2.The Investment Banks told their favoured customers that they were cutting the forward forecast after the latest data - besides being unheard of, these people had 7 days to act, so they really have no excuses.

3. Those IB clients who were not told are apparently Very Upset - but methinks they protest toomuch - for such supposedly smart and in the groove people, it beggars belief they were unable to do the maths themselves when the news of the changes toshares and price was made public - even reading a few knowledgeable blogs (like this one ) and newspapers would have told them that there was a bad moon on the rise.

4. No, I suspect they still thought they could still flip their shares to the Greater Fools out there, but the NASDAQ glitches meant they couldnt - so for once the dumb money was saved from its own stupidity. Hooray for NASDAQ , for once our pensions have not been sucker punched.

5. And now there is a desperate scramble to get NASDAQ to make up their losses, and it would appear the under-writing banks can't even short the stock to wash their faces

And now the Regulator is getting interested in that selective disclosure....:

Reuters reported that Morgan Stanley selectively disclosed the change in Facebook estimates, which drew the attention of the main regulator of U.S. brokerages.

"That's a matter of regulatory concern to us and I'm sure to the SEC," said Richard Ketchum, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's chairman and chief executive. "And without saying whether it's us or the SEC, we will collectively be focusing on it.

I think times are about to get interesting... this is just the end of the beginning.

Actually, I rather admire Facebook in a perverse way - they used others' predictable greed to rake every penny that anyone was ever going to put on the table into their own trousers, into the biggest war chest ever. They won't need to tap the markets again for ages - probably just as well, the banks won't be laughing.

Still, if you look at the whole Facebook Story of their culture and ethos from Day One, why would one be surprised