Shares gained 23 cents on its first day as a public stock.
The Chrysler Building is visible behind the animated facade of the Nasdaq MarketSite, welcoming the Facebook IPO, in New York's Times Square. Shares gained 23 cents today, the first day of trading.
After an anxiety-filled half-hour delay, its stock began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market for the first time as investors were finally able to put a dollar value on the company that turned online social networking into a global cultural phenomenon.
The stock opened at 11:32 a.m. at $42.05, but soon dipped to $38.01. By noon, it was up again at $40.40, a 6 percent increase. It fluttered throughout the afternoon, but it never hit the double-digit jump that many Facebook-watchers had expected.
By the end of the day, more than 500 million shares had changed hands. The closing price means Facebook is worth about $105 billion, more than Amazon.com, McDonald's and storied Silicon Valley icons Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.
But as many people looked for a big first-day pop in Facebook’s share price, the single-digit increase was somewhat of a letdown.
“It wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been,” said Nick Einhorn, an analyst with IPO advisory firm Renaissance Capital. “But I don’t think we should view it as a failure.”