Facebook IPO For Your College Fund?

Jim Supple and his daughter Jade are seen here in this undated file photo.

The drum beating over Facebook's upcoming IPO has created a supercharged atmosphere where investors are clamoring for a piece of the action.

Take Jim Supple. He's already tried to buy the stock in advance of the IPO, so far without success.

Supple has a job in finance for one of the largest dating applications on Facebook, AreYouInterested.com, by SNAP Interactive, with over 60 million installations. Despite that connection, he told ABC News he hadn't thought to buy Facebook until his daughter Jade suggested it to him last fall.

Jade at the time was 10.

"Jade was the one who called it to my attention," says Supple. "She mentioned it in the car when I picked her up from school." He recalls her saying, 'I know they're selling pieces of the company. Daddy, could we sell some of what else we own and buy Facebook?'

She told him she'd read about the IPO at school. "All the kids in sixth grade know about Facebook," says Supple, who first told the  Wall Street Journal about his experience. "They all have accounts."

Supple says he already had a "decent sized" college fund for Jade, which included the stocks of eBay, Disney (parent company of ABC News), and others. He decided to take $25,000 of this to buy a piece of Facebook.

Easier said than done.

First he tried to buy some of the 70,000 shares that two former Facebook employees were auctioning on the secondary market at SharesPost Inc. But his bid of $30.01 proved too low. "I lost by $1 and some change," he says. "I said to Jade, 'Sorry, but somebody bid higher.'"

Their next chance, he told her, would be the IPO itself, expected on Friday.

That day, he thinks, will be "a crazy day-a choppy day. Some will buy but probably lose at the close. Some of the people are going to get sandbagged, because of overzealousness."

He and Jade, he says, will wait until the dust settles.

"We'll see where it goes after the IPO," he says. "We'll wait to see a quarterly earnings report or two, then maybe then jump in. We'll play it by ear."

His attitude now is philosophical: "If I miss the boat, it was meant to be. There are other stocks out there."