First things first: Remember, as you read the financial musings below, that they come from ME: a Jew with no money; a biological anomaly, like a dolphin who can’t swim or a Mexican who hates Megadeth and is allergic to dish soap.

As I noted in my pre-Facebook IPO post, anyone who takes my meaningless blog ejaculations and attempts to bet real money on them should have their head and testicles examined.

That being said, I do have some front-line insight of what exactly went down during the IPO, and I’m stunned that no similar conclusions have thus far been published in the annals of legitimate Q3 2012 financial literature.

Let me break it down:

On the morning of the Facebook IPO, I was all called-in-sick, sitting at home, kids in school, Venti Redeye in my clutching Hebrew hand.

I put in a limit order for 200 shares of Facebook at 45 a share. (if you don’t know what a limit order is you’re in the wrong post—go check out the Wonderhussy.)

Just like an all-time record number of amateur E-trade jerkoffs, I sat nervously waiting for the 11AM opening bell.

10:58
10:59
11:00!!!

…

11:01
11:02…

It never rang.

11:15. Still didn’t ring.

11:30. What the fuck?! Chinese water torture.

This delay was my first clue that something was going wrong, but I had no idea what. By now we know that it was due to NASDAQ’s systems melting down under the unprecedented load, like a Nebraska freshman cheerleader spending a night with the Knicks.

Finally, just after 11:30—BOOM!—the opening bell rang, and the price shot to 42. Okay, cool, I thought. This is lower than I expected, so my limit order should have gone through at 42 tops, right? Wrong.

It didn’t go through at all: My E-trade order still said “Pending.”

Nine grand on the line, and I can’t tell if my order was filled. Here’s where I started to panic; and so did a billion other jerkoffs. It felt like lending a stranger your checkbook and using his nuts as a blindfold.

Now, HERE is what the fuck happened to the Facebook IPO, and it involves a phenomenon so obvious that I’m stunned I don’t see it phrased this way on ANY of the billion articles that have been written about this historic event. (Please, guys, prove me wrong.)

Everyone knows that the reason my trade wasn’t going through is because Nasdaq couldn’t handle the incoming rush of orders. However, THIS is the only reason that Facebook never got its pop: If all the orders had gone through, the price would have skyrocketed because of all the demand, and today we’d be looking at another exponential overvaluation.

Instead, people saw the price open at 42, get denied a pop due to Nasdaq’s incompetence, and then never climb.

Just like with a bad acid trip, terror that the IPO was turning sour was ITSELF the thing that turned it sour.

But back to ME: Without the benefit of hindsight, I was still in the game completely blind.

God DAMN was I pissed:

As soon as I saw that the volume on the stock was through the roof, but that MY fucking limit order for OVER the ask still wasn’t filled, I knew some system somewhere was broken. I assumed it was E-trade—didn’t realize it was Nasdaq—but either way, I didn’t want to play ball with a fucking hole in my glove.

It’s bad enough that anytime you fuck with stocks you’re like a Smurf playing against the Celtics—you shouldn’t ALSO have to do it wearing tiny oven mitts.

(The ONLY time I ever fuck with stocks, BTW, is when I see some way of betting on predictable human psychology. It never has anything to do with a company. )

So with my order still at Pending, I said FUCK YOU E-trade, I’m not going to sit here in a wheelchair with the rest of the world trading this stock—CANCEL.

E-Trade’s response: PENDING CANCEL.

In other words, they’re not guaranteeing anything. They can wait all day and at five minutes to 4PM say, OK we finally got to your order—good news! We got you some nice shiny Facebook stock at 45—just like you asked, boss!

I went apeshit.

They had my fucking money, they weren’t telling me what they were gonna do with it, and I just had to sit there.

I called, I wrote psychotic emails, I waited all day by the computer hitting reload.

I felt like I had shoved my balls through a clock-tower window and just had to wait all day for the minute hand to come around and slowly pierce my nuts until the testes bulged and burst from the sack. Holding the bag indeed.

When four o’clock came and went, I had to pick up my kids before their teachers called child services. I stood there in the schoolyard hitting reload on my E-trade app nonstop, so they probably called child services anyway.

This didn’t last long—only ALL FUCKING WEEKEND while these dumb fucks sat and jerked off on my cancel order.

FINALLY on Monday at around noon, I looked at the app and saw the the sweetest word in the amateur trader dictionary: CANCELLED.

I felt like I had won the lottery.

Just imagine you went to the dry cleaners and the Asians told you you had accidentally left 9K in your pants pocket: did you make any money? Not really; but YES. YES!

One more thing: Other than me not losing ten grand on this hunk of fuck, the coolest thing about Facebook IPO was this:

Morgan Stanley had to defend the IPO price of 38 or they would look like a bunch of fucking clowns. Therefore, they had to spend BILLIONS of dollars to artificially keep the price up. High Frequency Traders realized that SOMEONE was defending this magical invisible line, and they took this shit to fucking TOWN, selling shares at 38.05 in the gazillions and leaning against Morgan Stanley’s blistered balls at 38.

TRACTOR BEAM:

Good. BURN, you fucking cunts.

—BENJAMIN LEO
Follow a thousandaire on Twitter

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