Facebook stock ended trading Monday 9.1%
lower at $20.79 a share, as investors reacted to reports of a security
bug and renewed their worries about the company's future.
Shares initially suffered Monday following a weekend report in Barron's, the weekly newspaper published by The Wall Street Journal, claiming shares of the No. 1 social networking stock are overvalued and could fall to $15 a share.
Later
in the day, there was discussion on online news sites, alleging private
messages were appearing online on users' public 'wall' pages. At one
point, shares were trading 10% lower for the day.
"A
small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly
believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline," a Facebook
representative said in an emailed statement. "Our engineers investigated
these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that
had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is
satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy," the emailed
statement said.
The stock was supposed to get a
boost Monday, after being added to the obscure Nasdaq Q-50 index. The
Q-50 index is a list of the stocks likely to be added to the widely
watched Nasdaq 100 index, a collection of the 100 most valuable
non-financial stocks trading on the Nasdaq.
However,
bears on the stock continue to say that Facebook is actually worth $15 a
share or less. The stock got a lift last week on the coattails of
positive comment from CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier in the month.
Shares,
though, have been a disaster for investors who piled into the initial
public offering that debuted May 18. Shares are now about 45% below the
IPO price of $38 a share.
USA Today