The sleazeballs who manipulate Facebook shares for a living were hard at work Wednesday night, lopping more than $50 off the share price in thin, after-hours trading. Say one thing for these guys, they certainly have a knack for turning bad news into opportunity. Instead of paying as much as $218 per share toward the end of Wednesday’s session, they hyper-leveraged a punk earnings report after the close to orchestrate a plunge to as low as $164. That amounts to a 25% haircut in the blink of an eye for a minuscule earnings miss, a mildly downbeat forecast for the next two quarters and subpar user growth in Q2.

Ordinarily we could count on the trade-desk Svengalis to run the stock back up sellers’ wazoo as soon as the latter are devastated and spent. In this case, however, the shares may need to adjust more or less permanently to certain new realities concerning the way Facebook gathers and uses information about its billion-and-a-half subscribers. Each and every one of them has the potential to be ‘monetized’, as we well know, but perhaps less aggressively now that Zuckerberg & Co. have come under close scrutiny by Congress and EU mandarins. Facebook is certain to face more stringent privacy rules, and so the stock is not entirely likely to recoup tonight’s losses with the usual, unseemly quickness. In any case, FB will be largely untradable, other than by machines, in the days and weeks ahead as bulls and bears move back toward equilibrium._______ UPDATE (August 5, 5:08 p.m. EDT): It has taken the aforementioned sleazeballs more than a week to engineer a bottom, but by Friday it looked as though they’d finally succeeded, provoking some short-covering that has put the sold-out lows behind.  I don’t have any compelling rally targets to offer you at the moment, but I’ll note nonetheless that a print at 192 would recoup half of what was lost when DaBoyz let the stock fall July 26 on ‘bad’ news.