Wall Street keeps hitting Facebook’s unshare button.
Investors revolted against Mark Zuckerberg’s social network giant yesterday, running for the exits and driving down its share price 11.7 percent to $23.70 — its lowest closing price since its May 17 debut.
In fact, the beaten-down shares are now trading below where Facebook was valued in February 2011 when it was handing out employee stock awards at $24.10.
With the latest drop, CEO Zuckerberg’s stock fortune faded from $13.7 billion to $12.1 billion.
While the stock is starting to look cheap, especially to retail investors still holding onto the hype, analysts say it is still not time to buy.
In just 13 trading days — on Aug. 16 — the first of several insider stock lock-up periods expire — and boatloads of shares may hit the market, further depressing the price, analysts warned.
“Institutional investors may not develop a sense of urgency to buy shares in front of significant lock-up expirations,” Jordan Rohan, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus wrote in a note to clients yesterday.
Just half of Wall Street analysts following the company suggest buying Facebook shares.
There are about 420 million Facebook shares trading, or 15 percent of the company, but by November another billion or more are expected to free up, according to Ken Sena of Evercore Partners.
“This overhang is likely to be drawn out,” Sena told clients yesterday.
Facebook further spooked investors by not providing guidance for this quarter or all of 2012.