Minor status update

SAN JOSE, Calif. – After opening at a price of $42.05, shares of Facebook’s wildly anticipated initial public offering closed at $38.37, near its preset price of $38.

But while that disappointed some experts, the most successful technology IPO in history set a record for the number of shares sold – 566 million – in a company’s stock market debut. The previous record was held by General Motors, with 458 million shares sold on its first day.

In the first 45 minutes that Facebook was trading, it accounted for a record 24 percent of trades executed by customers of online brokerage TD Ameritrade, according to the Associated Press. By comparison, on its first day back on the stock market in November 2010, General Motors represented 7 percent of overall trades on TD Ameritrade. For the LinkedIn IPO in May 2011, the figure was 5 percent.

The company’s feverishly-anticipated Wall Street debut – initially set for 8 a.m. – was held up about 30 minutes after NasdaqOMX Group said it was “experiencing a delay” in opening shares of Facebook, according to Bloomberg. But when the stock began officially trading, investors initially boosted the company’s record $104 billion valuation even higher.

Several social networking companies had seen their stocks dip Thursday, including LinkedIn, Jive and Yelp. Analysts said that may be a result of a broader market decline, although some suggested investors may be freeing up funds to buy Facebook instead.

Max Wolff, an analyst with Greencrest Capital in New York, said Facebook’s opening price of just $42 a share indicated surprisingly soft demand, given that the company’s shares had been trading for more than that in the secondary markets.

Wolff, however, did not expect Facebook’s stock to dip below its opening price of $38 a share, saying that the underwriters and other big investors have put in place automated “buy” orders at that price.

He also was puzzled by the market’s treatment of Zynga, noting that at the $7.15-a-share range at which it was trading around mid-morning, its market cap of $5.74 billion represents far less than its contribution to Facebook’s revenues. According to its IPO filings, Facebook made 12 percent of its money last year from Zynga’s social games. So if the stock market has deemed Facebook to be worth $100 billion, Wolff said, its valuation of Zynga’s stock doesn’t compute.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell for the Nasdaq stock exchange on a stage set up outside at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time Friday, after employees spent all night coding in one of the company’s regular “hackathons.” Zuckerberg was joined on the stage by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and dozens of other employees.

As soon as Zuckerberg pushed the button to ring the bell, his Facebook page gained a status update that read “Mark listed FB on Nasdaq.” The company later revealed that a group of Facebook engineers “hacked” the Nasdaq bell mechanism to automatically trigger the update over a mobile phone connection. The update tagged Sandberg and four other Facebook executives.

Facebook completed its initial public offering Thursday, pricing the stock at $38 and selling 421 million shares, which raked in $16 billion at a record valuation for a U.S. company at IPO time. The world’s most popular social network is likely to sell an additional 63 million shares, known as an overallotment, to bring the total proceeds to $18.4 billion, the second-highest total in history for a U.S. company.

Early interest in the new stock was so feverish that Facebook this week raised the potential range of its IPO price, which was originally listed as $28 to $35. At the final price of $38, most of the shares sold in the IPO went to institutional funds and other big clients of the IPO’s underwriters.

“Given the demand that they had, it doesn’t take a genius to predict the stock is likely to have a pretty good day,” said Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia. “How high does it go? It’s hard to tell.”

Zuckerberg was not the only person talking about Facebook’s IPO on the social network: Co-founder Eduardo Saverin, whose relationship with Zuckerberg was at the center of the Oscar-winning film “The Social Network,” congratulated his college classmate in a Facebook post that included a picture of an “About” page from the nascent social network in 2005.

“Congrats to everyone involved in the project from day one till today, and I especially wanted to congratulate Mark Zukerberg on keeping tremendous stead-fast focus, however hard that was, on making the world a more open and connected place,” Saverin wrote.

Zuckerberg still owns 503.6 million shares and options after the IPO, which are worth $19.1 billion at the IPO price. That wealth would make him the 29th-richest person in the world, Bloomberg News reported.