Why GOOG is “After Hours” while FB is “Pre-market”?
It looks like GOOG did not have a pre-market trade until 7:14 am ET, so Google Finance was still reporting the last trade it had, which was in the after-hours session yesterday. FB, on the other hand, was trading like crazy after-hours yesterday and pre-market today as it had an earnings report yesterday. Pre-Market trading activity is shown on the site from 4:15 - 9:30 AM (actual trading starts at 4:00 AM EST) The NASDAQ Stock Market Trading Sessions (Eastern Time) Pre-Market Trading Hours from 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Market Hours from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. After-Market Hours from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/about/trading-schedule.aspx#ixzz38OtcISrq In this case GOOG did not trade in the Pre-market until that time and FB was.
If I understand you correctly, you are noticing that a stock's price can change drastically when the time changes from pre-market trading hours to open market hours. This could occur because a much smaller pool of investors make trades during pre-market and after-market hours. When the regular market opens there is a large influx of trades, causing the prices to jump. Your employer's matching contribution is calculated based on the dollar amounts you end up putting in. The nature of your 401(k) contribution—whether pre-tax or Roth after-tax—doesn't matter with respect to how their match gets calculated, and their match always goes into a pre-tax account, even if you are contributing after-tax. The onus is on you to choose a contribution amount that maximizes your employer match regardless of the nature of your contribution. Maximizing your employer match using Roth after-tax contributions will eat up more of your annual gross salary, but as long as you are willing to do that then you won't leave free employer match money on the table. Roth after-tax contributions don't get the tax deduction inherent in a pre-tax contribution. The tradeoff is that you end up with less take-home pay per period if you contribute the same number of dollars on a Roth after-tax basis to your 401(k) as opposed to on a pre-tax basis. For instance, to make a maximum $18,000 Roth after-tax contribution to a 401(k), it's going to cost you a lot more than $18,000 of your annual gross salary to net the same $18,000 number. (On the flip side, the Roth money is worth more in retirement than pre-tax money, because it won't be subject to taxes then.) However, 401(k) plan contribution amounts are almost always expressed as a percentage of gross salary, i.e. in pre-tax terms, even when electing to make after-tax contributions! So when electing after-tax, one is implicitly accepting that the contribution will cost more than the percentage of gross salary, because you'll need to pay the tax on a gross amount that would yield the same number of dollars but as an after-tax amount. To clarify something: FB did not inflate their share price, Morgan Stanley did.  Every company on the IPO wants a billion dollars a share, but thats not possible so they take what the market will give them, FB played their cards right. MS didn't disclose that their analysts (not auditors) changed their minds.  For fun stuff: read up on ETF arbitrage with HFT, this kinda stuff happens everyday on a micro scale. I don't think that the trading volume would impact a broker's ability to find shares to short.  You might think that a lot more people are trying to short a stock during regular trading hours than in the pre-market, and that's probably true.  But what's also true is that a lot more people are covering their shorts during regular trading hours than in the pre-market.  For stocks that have difficulty in finding shares to short, any time someone covers a short is an opportunity for you to enter a short. If you want to short a stock and your broker is rejecting your order because they can't find shares to short, then I would recommend that you continue placing that order throughout the day.  You might get lucky and submit one of those orders right after someone else has covered their short and before anyone else can enter a short.  I have had success doing this in the past. I'm personally not sold on Facebook.  It collects vast amounts of data, sure, but to what purpose? I am probably missing something. I presume they intend to monetize this data for marketing activities, but is that really *that* valuable? Large budget marketing teams already have more data about their customers than they can effectively analyze.  Yet, they **still** miss with products. More data is not going to make up for the quality of personnel. Apparent data-feed issues coming out of NASDAQ in the after hours market. Look at MSFT, AMZN, AAPL, heck even Sears.      Funny thing though, is that you see traces of irregular prices during the active session around 10:20am on stocks like GOOG. the data source is the same as the live market trading. pre and after market trading are active markets and there are actual buyers and sellers getting their orders matched. I didn't mean that in a pedantic sense.  Facebook hasn't been a simple object belonging to a particular person for some time now.  I would say his influence must now be lessening, and other forces will determine  FB's destiny.