Yesterday, Facebook’s shares for the first time fell below $20. Their value at the the social network’s IPO on May 17 was $38, this means that in just over two months it has almost halved.

In the months preceding Facebook’s IPO, it seemed that this operation would make all its investors rich, instead after a brief rise in the social network shares value they closed the first day of trading with a value just a few cents higher than the initial one.

In the days following the IPO, Facebook’s shares started losing value but above all suspicion and controversy began. The SEC, the authority that controls the American Stock Exchange, opened an investigation to verify if some big investors had illegally received confidential information concering negative estimates on future Facebook’s revenue.

Basically, there was an excessive evaluation of Facebook that led to set an initial value for its shares that was too high. Of course if the big investors have really played dirty, small investors were actually crushed, victims of large financial games.

Another major problem surfaced in possible system malfunction that caused Nasdaq to create chaos in the trading, something very negative whereas in stock market timing is crucial. The fact that a purchase or sale is completed after hours rather than in milliseconds changes everything.

In recent days, the Swiss bank UBS announced plans to sue Nasdaq for these problems, claiming losses for over $350 million as a result. In this case, according to the UBS lawyers the Nasdaq system ran several times the same orders leading to the purchase of many more Facebook shares than they actually ordered. Considering the fall in share value it’s easy to see that if this is the case the losses estimate makes sense.

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Meanwhile, Facebook has announced that it has estimated that about 83 million accounts on its social network are fake, about 8,7%. Almost 5% of Facebook accounts are duplicate profiles but there’s a 1.5% consisting of fake profiles created specifically for spamming.

It remains to be seen whether the estimate is correct or fake profiles are actually even more, especially those created by spammers. A few days ago a company that did an advertising campaign on Facebook denounced the fact that 80% of clicks on their banners was made by bots and not by real people, causing further controversy.

There seems to be no peace for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (photo ©Guillaume Paumier). Despite everything, he’s still very rich but predictions concering his social network’s shares value at this point are really grim.