In the last minutes of trading today, a team of underwriters lead by fat cat brokerage house Morgan Stanley had to rush in to buy up shares of Facebook to keep their investment from dipping below the $38 share price set earlier this week.
Although Business Insider was FREAKING OUT over this, the LA Times calmly reports this is standard practice, especially for high-profile IPOs like this. (In other words, this thing is still as overly dramatic as we suspected.)
Anyhow, the stock closed with a gain of 23 cents after a day of trading that went as high as $42.05 before dropping back down. Meaning the crowdsourced Twitter prediction of $54 was way off base.
Trading was also plagued by mishaps on Nasdaq's part, which reportedly caused some investors to back away fearing more system problems. We can't imagine Zuckerberg is happy about that after Nasdaq duked it out with the NYSE for the chance to put the company to market.
