24/7 Wall St.

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) is about to get the biggest lock-up expiration of its shares to date. On Wednesday, November 14, 2012 there will be very close to 800 million shares of Facebook’s common stock which become eligible for sale. Effectively this will double the public float of shares of about 921 million shares.

It needs to be known that Facebook shares have slipped since it saw that pop higher after its earnings report. Before earnings the stock was at $19.50. Then the stock popped to $23.23 on more than 200 million shares. After a drop of 1.3% so far on Tuesday, the shares are back down to $19.86. It is suddenly as if the earnings boost has disappeared entirely.

Each of the two prior lock-up expirations brought selling. We would note that Pater Thiel, who was one of the founders of PayPal, has already unloaded most of his stock. He has 20% of his holdings which are about to be eligible for sale.

Facebook’s post-IPO range has been $17.55 to $45.00 and its market cap is currently about $42.6 billion according to Yahoo! Finance. Attached is a post-IPO chart courtesy of stockcharts.com.

JON C. OGG