SEC to review Nasdaq glitches in Facebook IPO

By Andrew Tangel

May 18, 2012 12 AM PT

NEW YORK -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will review trading glitches with Nasdaq’s handling of Facebook’s IPO.

“As is our practice, staff will review the incident with Nasdaq to determine its cause and steps that will be taken to address it,” SEC spokesman John Nester said in a statement after an inquiry from The Times.

Brokerages complained of technical issues with the Nasdaq exchange, as investors did not know whether their trades in the highly anticipated stock offering had been executed.

The increasingly computerized nature of Wall Street trading has come under regulatory scrutiny ever since the May 2010 “flash crash,” in which $1 trillion briefly vanished from the stock market.

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