Lend Lease shares crashed more than 16% after hedge funds took a wrong bet on a successful $302.5m capital raising.

Lend Lease resumed trading after the institutional placement of 50 million shares at $6.10 each, a discount of 11.5% to its last traded price of $6.76 on Tuesday.

Although Lend lease is now one of the market's best capitalised companies, investors dumped its units yesterday, forcing the price down to $5.51 before the stock recovered to close at $5.66.

The Australian