Fidelity Investments acknowledges many of its clients were affected by trading issues related to Facebooks tumultuous Initial public offering Friday,though the brokerage wont say whether itll reimburse clients and follow Morgan Stanleys lead.
The key question: Can Facebook parlay its vast legions of users into huge profits, as Google did following its 2004 initial public offering.
The social media sites Initial public offering has been steeped in controversy since it started trading last Friday.
BROKERS UP IN ARMSAdvisers familiar with the situation said many investors are now finding out, nearly a week after the fact, that their orders were not executed at the prices they thought.
All Facebook stock trades in clients accounts from May 18 have been confirmed, a Fidelity spokesman said.
He says Fidelity will continue to do so until we are confident Nasdaq has done everything to mitigate the impact to our customers.
EDT (1750 GMT) on Friday, according to a trading alert issued by the exchange on Monday morning.
It managed to add just 23 cents in its first hours of trading on Friday, then suffered a big decline on Monday.
Morgan Stanley is also still tending to trade orders placed by brokerage customers on Friday, two people familiar with the situation said.
It has been reported that “thousands” of Fidelity’s clients have been affected by trading issues which arose following the initial public offering of Facebook.
However, customers should assume that any shares of Facebook stock currently credited to their accounts are owned by them and available for trading.
Facebook, working with Morgan Stanley, first set a range of $28 to $35 for the offering price, then raised the range to $34 to $38 before setting it at $38 on the night before the Initial public offering.
Fidelity was not immediately available to comment on the extent of customer issues related to the Facebook Initial public offering.
“We will continue to work with the industry to get NASDAQ to come to a resolution that addresses the concerns of our customers,” Fidelity said in the notice.
Boston based Fidelity has 18.3 million brokerage accounts and reported nearly 396,000 average daily commissionable trades in the first quarter.
(Reporting By Tim McLaughlin; Editing by Walden Siew and Maureen Bavdek).
Brielle Shreiber is a business journalist based in Munich, Germany. Brielle has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Brielle spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.
