Explaining Facebook Stock Price Swings

from what you've described there it seems like the norm for FB. If you look even further back than just the last 3 days, you'll notice that FB has a 3-6% intraday swing between the low's and high's pretty much since the thing started trading. Of course there will be outliers where there was a 10%+ change. As for an actual reason, I don't know if you would find one better than just simplying investor emotion.

3) The company, in oreder to boost revenue from marketing over wireless devices, is testing a service that places advertisements on mobile applications other than its own.

In Google Finance, you can read the news for the company and match the corresponding letter the the time it was released. You can see how it positively or negatively affects the stock price. All trading is based on market psychology, and many times the change in price does not have good reason behind it.

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:FB

Large investors buying/selling blocks of shares can push the price a bit as well.

Also shorter and short squeezes on these sorta of stocks are pretty common which is why you see huge swings. I'd stay away from FB tho. Its a speculation at this pnt and can swing 10-20% in a week in either directions, same with solar companies right now, rimm, and nokia. If you want to learn investing start off properly with a safe company. Wanna learn to be a trader, go ahead and play whit facebook, see how much of the profit you can make, while limiting your losses on the bad days.

Thank you everybody! That was very helpful. It's also really humbling to see so many intelligent people split on whether a stock will rise or fall... and then you throw casual investors (like me!) into the mix that get betrayed by their own emotion and add another unpredictable element... and all the while you know somebody's programs and algorithms are mechanically crunching away at every movement... this is all so interesting.

Honestly, moves that small are just random fluctuations. You don't need news to make moves like that. Also, Facebook sucks and is probably going lower.

Hey,

Also important to look at what's happening in the broader market as well, for example if this had happened exactly a week later it could have almost all been explained by the improvement in risk sentimenet due to QE3, and European ESM approval, and a correction of that earlier this week.

In this situation, it was probably random fluctuations.

Yahoo Finance is great to see what possible catalysts are, as it has a Headlines section that will give you relevant news for a particular stock, that way you can figure out whether it was just flows or actual news hitting the tape.