Facebook’s shares simply can’t seem to be succeessful and on Tuesday they closed at $31, 18% less than their $38 initial offer from last Friday. After a lot of speculations, however, it looks like there will also be an official investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – the authority that monitors the stock market – and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authorithy (FINRA), a private organization that however has some authority in the management of financial exchanges.

After Facebook’s disappointing debut on Nasdaq, many hypotheses were made as to why an IPO that everyone predicted as a historic success turned so bad instead. Technical problems emerged in the Nasdaq system that had a negative impact on trading, so that compensations for several million dollars could arrive to investors who have had problems making trades.

Now, however, other factors have emerged about what happened behind the scenes on the eve of Facebook IPO. In fact documents emerged that show how the analysts of important investors such as bank Morgan Stanley and perhaps even Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan cut their estimates about Facebook. In particular, it seems that the projections of revenue growth for the second quarter and full year 2012 were reduced.

At this point the mystery begins. How is it possible that three different analysts have independently concluded that the prospects of Facebook revenue were poorer than expected? The hypothesis is that it was a Facebook executive who revealed the issue but there are no official statements.

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The problem is that it seems that this revelation was made only to some analysts of big investors but not to the smaller investors. If true, this influenced the results of Facebook IPO and hurt those who bought the social network shares knowing nothing about that.

To learn more we’ll have to wait for the SEC and FINRA investigations. What is certain is that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (photo ©Guillaume Paumier) got richer anyway, the big Wall Street investors had privileged information prior to the IPO and small investors became cannon fodder in one of the largest public offerings in history.