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maybird

I'm confused by this "greenshoe" business.

To prevent the price of something from falling, you can:

(1) Increase its demand.

(2) Decrease its supply.

Which one does the "greenshoe" do?

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The greenshoe increases the demand. MS placed a 38.00 bid with an enormous size, so if you were to look at the live feed, you would have seen something like: Bid: 38.00 x 9999999 Ask: 38.01 x 1234

I feel like its worth adding, for those who don't trade. If the stocks goes down, you are looking for short/long terms supports it may [temporarily] stop on. Those are usually backed up by either history of the stock (recent supports) or psychological barriers (like a round number). In situation of a stock with couple hours of history those will be psychological like number 38. Then a trader looks how much support there is on certain level. In this example there were about $300MM (IIRC) worth of stock somebody asked to buy. So if you ready to sell because there is a panic and stock does not want to go up, you see so much cheddar [of support at $38] that someone is willing to buy that you tell yourself: "there is no chance someone will sell so much stock, so it won't go lower". So you don't sell at this point of time. Less people want to sell, more demand for the stock. Stock then stops or goes up, BUT at least the fall was indefinitely defended.

But again, depends what decisions big fish will do over this weekend, Monday morning you may see shit on $38, or if they offer plenty for sell at any price, you may see a gap down like start trading at $36.

Hope this helps.

via gojomo http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3993727

http://lockerz.com/s/209964861

  Bid (size): 38.00 (x9999900)     Ask (size): 38.01 (x146300)

Decreases supply. They bought up shares on the market, as opposed to buying them from FB itself.

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