STOCK & ROLL: Sam Lesser, 11, raided his piggy bank to buy ,000 worth of Facebook shares, and his trade is still in Nasdaq limbo. (NY Post: Chad Rachman)
Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg will not get a friend request from this 11-year-old any time soon.
Fifth-grader Sam Lesser is one of a long line of average-Joe investors who still don’t know if their orders for Facebook shares have been filled — three days after he plunked down $10,000 on the company.
“They are holding my money hostage,” said Lesser, a student at The Town private school who lives on the Upper East Side.
The stock trader’s dreams of owning a small slice of Facebook turned into a nightmare on Friday, when he and his mother found out his order for 300 shares may not have been filled due to Nasdaq computer glitches.
Lesser — who likes to play football and tennis when he’s not playing the stock market — anted up $10,000 by using the profits from the small business he started, called SML Networks.
His company sells bracelets and skateboards, mostly to classmates and neighbors.
“It’s really disappointing, because we could have made money on this,” he said.
He would know.
Lesser owns a stake in Apple — which he bought when he was 5.
He won’t say how much it’s worth.
As for his Facebook trades, Lesser and his mom are still haggling with officials at their local Fidelity Investments.
“We’ve spoken with three senior traders and nobody seems to have any answers at Fidelity,” said Lesser’s mom.
“We feel misguided and misled,” she said, adding that some of her son’s potential profits were going to go to Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong charity.
Average investors, like the Lessers, are fuming as they wait to hear whether their orders will ever be completed.
“We continue to deal with the aftermath of Friday’s [trading glitches],” said Fidelity spokesman Steve Austin.
Fidelity, along with a number of retail firms like Charles Schwab, were being flooded with orders for Facebook during its IPO, Austin said.
The firms are waiting to get a response from Nasdaq, and only then will they be able to tell customers if their orders were canceled or completed.
Nasdaq might have to fork over as much as $150 million to make big institutional investors whole due to similar trading issues, sources said.
The main culprit for the computer glitches is the long backlog of cancel orders that gummed up Nasdaq’s system right before the IPO began.
A staggering 581 million shares of Facebook traded hands on Friday, and Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld has said he is “embarrassed” about the glitches.