While much has already been written on the topic of peak valuation, social bubbles popping, and the ethical social utility of yesterday's historically overhyped IPO, nobody has done an analysis of the actual stock trading dynamics as in-depth as the following complete forensic post-mortem by Nanex. Because more than anything, those tense 30 minutes between the scheduled open and the actual one (which just happened to coincide with the European close), showed just how reliant any form of public capital raising is on technology and electronic trading. And to think there was a time when an IPO simply allowed a company to raise cash: sadly it has devolved to the point where a public offering is a policy statement in support of a broken capital market, which however is fully in the hands of SkyNet, as yesterday's chain of events, so very humiliating for the Nasdaq, showed. From a delayed opening, to 2 hour trade confirmation delays, virtually everyone was in the dark about what was really happening behind the scenes! As the analysis below shows, what happened was at times sheer chaos, where everything was hanging by a thread, because if FB had gotten the BATS treatment, it was lights out for the stock market. Well, the D-Day was avoided for now, but at what cost? And how much over the greenshoe FaceBook stock overallotment did MS have to buy to prevent it from tumbling below $30 because as Reuters reminds us [9], "had Morgan Stanley bought all of the shares traded around $38 in the final 20 minutes of the day, it would have spent nearly $2 billion." What about the first defense of $38? In other words: in order to make some $67 million for its Investment Banking unit, [9] was MS forced to eat a several hundred million loss in its sales and trading division just to avoid looking like the world's worst underwriter ever? We won't know for a while, but in the meantime, here is a visual summary of the key events during yesterday's far less than historic IPO.
May 18 - The Facebook IPO [10]
The first warning sign, was the delay in trading. Here's the status messages from Nasdaq for that day.
The first 4 charts are 5 second interval charts of Facebook showing the first hour and 15 minutes of quotes and trades.
Chart 1. NBBO (National Best Bid or Offer) Spread. Black: bid < ask (normal), Yellow: bid = ask (locked), Red: bid > ask (crossed)all bids and offers color coded by exchange.
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Chart 2. Best bids and offers (NBBO) color coded by exchange.
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Chart 3. All bids and offers color coded by exchange.
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Chart 4. All trades color coded by exchange.
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The next 4 images are tick charts showing quotes and trades. How to read these charts [15]
Chart 5. The first seconds of trading.
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Chart 6. The first seconds of trading, continued.
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Chart 7. Suddenly, a vacuum appears and produces a record 12,285 trades in 1 second.
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Chart 8. Same as above, showing just Nasdaq.
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The next 2 charts (10 second interval) show how Nasdaq's quote stopped, but trades from Nasdaq did not (direct feeds must have been fine, but not the consolidated).
Chart 9. Nasdaq Bids and Offers along with NBBO.
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Chart 10. Nasdaq Trades
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The next 2 charts (20 millisecond interval) show the effect when Nasdaq's quote returned. There were two significant gaps in quotes (for all exchanges) and 1 significant gap in trades.
Note how the gap in trades is not at the same time as the gaps in quotes.
Chart 11. All bids and offers color coded by exchange.
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Chart 12. All trades color coded by exchange.
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The next chart (5 millisecond interval) shows the result of the blast in trades and quotes when Nasdaq's quote returned. Trades printed at least 900 milliseconds before quotes, an impossibility if orders are being routed according to regulations. We have jokingly referred to this anomaly as fantaseconds [24].
Chart 13. Nasdaq bids and offers (triangles), Nasdaq trades (circles) and NBBO (gray/yellow/red shading).
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The next 2 charts (500 millisecond interval) detail the HFT Tractor Beam [26] area where coincidentally or not, Nasdaq quotes began "sputtering" right before stopping for about 2 hours.
Chart 14. NBBO Spread and quote rate from all exchanges.
Note the flat lines at the bottom. Also note how the quote rate (lower panel) surges when prices rise above the flat line, which is what we would expect. However, on Nasdaq (next chart)..
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Chart 15. NBBO Spread and quote rate from just Nasdaq.
When prices rise above the flat line, quotes from Nasdaq stop, exactly opposite of expected behavior and what we see from other exchanges at that time (see chart above).
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And finally, Nanex on the fallout [29]:
During the FaceBook's failed IPO [10] opening period (11 - 11:30) and shortly after the trading began, bad prices (spikes) began appearing in other stocks, including symbols APPL, INTU, NFLX, PDCO, QCOM, QLD, UST and ZNGA. They also occurred in Facebook during the first 15 minutes of trading (see Chart 4 on this page [10]). There are likely other stocks that were affected. In nearly all of these cases the price spikes were executing against quotes that were far outside the NBBO. Most of these executions occurred on the CBOE, and a few on Chicago and AMEX. Fortunately, by chance, the prices were not wide enough to trigger circuit breakers in these stocks.
We think these bad price executions are related to whatever issues Nasdaq was having in facebook and probably are from errors in routing software. A similar thing happened during BATS failed [30] IPO in AAPL [31] and other stocks.
Chart 1. AAPL
Chart 2. NFLX
Chart 3. QCOM
Chart 4. QLD
Chart 5. UST
