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82 million trades for FB in the first 30 seconds.

I have no idea if that's a lot or not, but it's pretty impressive to build a system capable of doing that.

As a point of comparison, NASDAQ handled trades for 750 million shares in 1.1 seconds for last year's Russell Reconstitution[1], one of the busiest equity trading days of the year.

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Indexes#Annual_reconsti...

Trading systems are trivially shardable by symbol or letter range; not so much help for a single symbol as in the case of an IPO.

They said 82 million shares were traded. That doesn't mean 82M trades. A trade often has a quantity higher than 1 share. It could be (say) 82 thousand trades with an average quantity of 1000 shares. As far as system performance is concerned, number of trades matter, number of traded shares don't.

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