Highlights From Facebook's Debut
Highlights From Facebook's Debut
Facebook's debut on the stock market was preceded by epic hype, delayed by a technical glitch and tracked minute-by-minute by investors around the world. In the end, the fuss was over a gain of 23 cents.
Here are some highlights of the day, as gathered by reporters from The Associated Press:
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STATUS UPDATE
On Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page, under recent activity, was this, posted shortly after 9:30 a.m. EDT:
"Mark listed FB on NASDAQ."
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STAT CHECK
Facebook closed at $38.23, a gain of 23 cents, or 0.61 percent.
About 570 million shares were traded on its first day as a public company. For perspective, that is roughly equal to the combined trading volume of 28 of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average — every Dow stock except Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.
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'LIKE KISSING YOUR SISTER'
All that excitement for 23 cents. And it took a rush of buyers in the final minutes to achieve even that. Facebook was hugging the $38 mark for much of the final hour of trading.
In theory, closing near the IPO price is good. It means that the banks that took the company public judged demand almost perfectly, and got the most money possible for selling stockholders.
"This is like kissing your sister," said John Fitzgibbon, founder of IPO Scoop, a research firm. "With all the drumbeats and hype, I don't think there'll be bar room bragging tonight."
— Bernard Condon, AP Business Writer
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THE EARLY INVESTOR
Alper Aydinoglu, a student at DePaul University in Chicago, got 50 shares via Etrade at $38, the offering price. He said that he was "disappointed with the first day of trading."
His gain on paper: $11.50.
And that was before Etrade's standard commission of $9.99.
He called it an excellent learning opportunity, though. "On top of everything," he added, "I now have the bragging rights that I participated in one of the most popular IPOs of all time."
— Pallavi Gogoi, AP Business Writer
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VIEW FROM THE NASDAQ
In Times Square, home of the Nasdaq, people took pictures of the giant Nasdaq billboard, which featured the Facebook logo. Some were "checking in" to the Nasdaq on Facebook.
As they waited for Facebook stock to start trading, people huddled outside the windows of the Nasdaq site holding up cellphones and cameras to take pictures of the first price change.
Nasdaq is an electronic market, and the site is a TV studio featuring monitors with constantly changing stock prices.
Frederick Nolde, 31, of Richmond, Va., was in New York for meetings and said that he bought 100 shares of Facebook through Etrade. He thinks the company is worth $100 billion, but he said the real question is how Facebook performs with mobile users.
"If they can figure that out, they'll do well," he said.
Dennis Hitchings, a retiree from Columbus, Ohio, said that he did not think Facebook is worth $100 billion — "They don't have the revenue" — but he did say he would buy the stock at $38.
— Joseph Pisani, AP Business Writer
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