It never was. It's sad to see these funds fall victim of stock market hype of this kind. I really wish them a quick and painless recovery.

I am surprised that investment groups can go so wrong with the emotional flow of investing in facebook. how can facebook stock justify 100 times valuation of annual earnings per share! see my blog that I wrote at the time of facebook IPO, estimating its true value. http://tarunbansal30.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/facebook-or-faceegg-egg-on-the-face-5/

Investing people's pension funds in the stock market is very risky and a serious mistake! I guess they didn't learn a thing after the Bank of Iceland debacle..or even the tulip crash of 1637!! My husband's retirement is already affected by him having to work 2 years longer. Now what? Will he have to work until 80 to enjoy the benefits?

Anyone who bought Facebook shares will be in for a rough ride. Think World online.....
Facebook will only be big, until the next new thing comes along. At the moment they have nothing but subscriber who could go elsewhere if they get dissatisfied. Not a good business model.

‘It is not in our interests or those of our clients to give such information,’
True, the interest of your clients is that you make profits and pay them their pensions. But as you are unable to do that, I think your clients will be content with firing the smart guy who proposed such investments.

They got Zuckered. It was only ever a cashing out exercise and anyone stupid enough to buy at 38 dollars a share should be banned from trading. Up or down the only winner in this IPO is GS.

It makes me very disturbed and angry and sad to now know that the people responsible for handling our pension money decide to take these types of absolutely stupid risks with it. I myself would not even think of investing my personal savings in Facebook stock - this is a brand new stock without any history of success or failure or anything. and the Dutch pension funds think its a good idea to invest in this? I am worried, very very worried. how stupid can you be?

Anyone stupid enough to trust Mark Zuckerberg deserves what happens to them. Incredible! This was a no-brainer to avoid. Google, it was not!

Who knows where your pension funds will be invested in, you have no say.
Meanwhile "Facebook's Bankers Will Split $176 Million In IPO Fees

It was a fiddle from start to finish. The big trading companies were allowed to trade from the start whilst the "little man" was forced to wait until last week before they could sell shares, thus allowing the big traders to profit, whilst the little man lost out. There should be one big investigation and jail sentences dished out to whoever is found guilty.

Social networking is for narcissists, and an unwise investment since the product is mostly trivia, dross and ephemera of no significant value. Better to invest in AEX companies, and to support the Dutch economy against short-selling by US speculators to drive down AEX and the euro.

It was clear from the beginning that the facebook quotation was scam. How is it possible that an expert analyst got duped ? Whoever decided the purchase should be sacked.

Read this to see that the ABP is no longer the ABP, and remember the articles of several weeks ago about how Goldman Sachs advises the ABP. Also, check who is in the administration of APG. He retired from ABP, sort of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_Pensioenfonds_ABP

@M there is nothing wrong with pensions taking long positions in the stock market, which always beat inflation and then some. The problem is investing pension funds in over-hyped IPOs with bad numbers, hoping for a Google-style post-IPO pop, which is what hedge funds are fore. Whomever made that decision should be fired.

Wait a sec... so let me get this straight... We are forced to give our money to ABP (instead of a different fund) and we then hire a very talented, expensive and qualified team of economists to run our money. This highly skilled group then decided to invest on Facebook, which at the time, many analysts were pointing at as a mistake? SERIOUSLY?

Hmm Really investing pension funds on facebook? I don't believe facebook investments. It's a big shame, I am sure even the six million is going I guess by the end of the year fb shares will be under 10 dollars.

Ok 1 i am dutch.
I know that the law here says; There not may speculating with things like pension money.
This law is came after the ysland happening .
This law is not long time ago been activated.
I will not be in the place from the people who have done this.
Shame on them.

I am surprised that anyone invested in it.Look what happened to Myspace from the worlds biggest social network to the worlds smallest and just overnight.Facebook has already lost millions of users the last year the only thing keeping people going on it are the addictive games they offer.Facebook will be a non entity soon and something else will take its place and the circle will go around like this till people realise that real life is far more rewarding.

Dont worry they are public pension funds, they can just raid our tax piggy account. The rest of us? Lucky I am loaded, what what.

@M
do you even know how pension funds work?
investing is what they do... and it is not the pensions investments that make retirement age longer, it is overall population growing life expectatition.
I really dont see a major problem here. pension funds in gerenal have a very diversified portfolio, and some of this money will be lost, while some other investments will payoff.

Pension funds have no business getting involved in new stock offerings... how utterly stupid. Whoever made that call should be sent packing.

@Bruno. My excuses. I used the ABP as an example of what can go wrong with one fund. I mention of Goldman Sachs was intentional. That firm advised former Greek governments about the necessary "creative bookkeeping" necessary to make it look like the country's finances were in better shape than they in fact were. Who knows what G-S did when it helped the ABP? Again, I'm just giving one example.

I: excuse me but we ALL see many many articles in the news recently that NL pension funds are cutting the payouts to retirees for exactly this reason; namely because they have taken uncalcualted bad risks with that money - like investing in Facebook stock. And you don't see a major problem here? I think the rest of us do see a major problem here, very major. I do not think denying this is a problem and avoiding taking action to correct it is a good idea.

how to make money in stocks by IBD founder will open your eyes mister trader.

Rebuttal to I
The rise in retirement age directly correlates with the austerity measures Holland has taken because of the financial crisis that occurred in 2008 where pension funds lost 17.4 % of their value. There are five countries in the EU where capital provides 40-50% of retirement incomes including The Netherlands. The financial part of the crisis has therefore had most impact in countries where private pensions already play a major part in providing old-age incomes and where private-pension assets are invested heavily in equities.

@I, I actually don't see your point. Investing in Facebook stocks has been immediately pointed out as a risky investment with an overrated IPO. Now pension funds should rather do secure investments, and this was clearly NOT a good one...

If Face Book was 24 carrot gold, sure why not invest, but....it's not!

So far from what i see on this site, loads of loonies, people having fights, posting their pets and talking crap, hey..they are my FB friends!! I-pod fiddlers that have forgotten how to live OFFLINE!!

Security services are a better investment, due to the BS terrorism scaremongering, try that instead..

I even loath logging in to this site, wish there was some alternative!

Win some, lose some. How many comments would we have seen here if facebook price would have jumped? Come on, 12 million is really peanuts in the whole scheme of things.

hot off the press this morning regarding NL pension funds with serious problems in de Volkskrant, front page: Dramatic pension payout reductions loom over many city and national workers here. The reductions (10% - 15%) in payouts are being threatened by a new law forcing the funds to hold a reasonable amout of money as collateral for the risks they take investing it. The reason these funds do not have this collateral: stupid and ridiculous risks taken while investing in our future. I hope DN will cover this story.

Looking for some quick returns on investment? Just invest in NSE, BSE or MCX listed stocks and commodities
and feel the difference. Free trial available

Jeepers, there's a lot of opinion on this one!

Pension funds will likely have a broad portfolio ranging from low risk, low growth investments to high risk, high reward investments. Some of those investments will do well, others less so, the focus being on the total portfolio providing an acceptable return. So we should focus less on whether or not they invested in Facebook (as an individual security) and focus more on two things:

1. did the overall portfolio make acceptable returns?

2. was the IPO process fair?

Two separate questions.

What a silly, biased article! DutchNews doesn't write when funds make millions on investments, only when (according to them) they lose millions! The funds cited also manage BILLIONS of Euros, not millions, so the proportionate loss is tiny relative to the overall funds they manage.
This is biased reporting. The fund's performance is professionally measured and can only be commented on when ALL the investments' performances are taken into account.

If we only hired investment managers who never get it wrong, we wouldn't have an investment management industry in the first place! Regarding investments, some perform, others don't, end of story. Those who don't understand this shouldn't be putting their funds into the market in the first place.

Most commenters above don't understand investment decision-making. Pension funds are usually very conservative in their investment choices. ABP is very careful in its investments. Facebook was probably bought because it is part of an index tracker - a very conservative investment strategy. If you use trackers you automatically buy a percentage of those funds that are part of the index.

Simon Paul: are you sure we don't understand it? because from where I am sitting when I see pension payout benefits being cut by up to 15%, it looks the the pension fund investors don't understand or know what they are doing. since pension funds all over the world are suffering from these 'investment decision-making' policies, I would dare to say that you may have actually spotlighted the problem quite well - and it ain't us!
Jim: the overall 'performance' of these funds is on the front page of every newspaper! namely, cutting payouts dramatically. yeah nice performance, huh

Who in their right mind would invest pension funds into something like Facebook? Too bad for the pensioners who do not know or have a say where investment companies put their hard earned money.