NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Facebook’s stock market debut is finally here — and investors jumped on the breathlessly hyped IPO, sending shares up almost 11% at the start of trade.
On Thursday night, Facebook set its final IPO price at $38 a share. When the stock began trading at 11:30 a.m. ET on Friday, the first trade came in at $42.05 per share.
But the stock quickly reversed course, dropping down to hover right around the $38 IPO price.
Trading was fast and intense. More than 80 million shares changed hands in the first 30 seconds of trading, and within 20 minutes, volume had spiked to 165 million shares.
The trading had been expected to start around 11 a.m. ET, but the opening was delayed. A few minutes into trading, Facebook lost some of its gains and was trading around $40 per share.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely, from the company’s headquarters in California. Facebook celebrated its public debut by gathering its staff Thursday night for an all-night hackathon.
At the $38 IPO price, Facebook is on track to raise $16 billion — making it the largest tech IPO in history. It’s the third largest IPO ever, trailing only the $19.7 billion raised by Visa in March 2008 and the $18.1 billion raised by automakereneral Motors in November 2010, according to rankings by Thomson Reuters.
Underwriters have the option to purchase an extra 63.2 million shares to cover any so-called over-allotments for excess demand. If that happens, Facebook will sell 484.4 million shares in total. That would bring the amount raised to $18.4 billion.
How much Facebook is worth: At $38 per share, Facebook’s market capitalization would be around $81 billion on IPO day.
Many Facebook employees and executives hold unexercised stock options. If all of those shares were exercised, Facebook’s outstanding share count would rise to around 2.8 billion — pushing the company’s total valuation closer to $107 billion.
Among all global companies, Facebook has the third-highest IPO-day valuation in history, according to data from DealLogic.
SecondMarket, an exchange on which people can buy and sell stock in private companies, posted data on Friday about Facebook’s private-trading history.
It wasn’t until 2010 that SecondMarket’s Facebook trades racked up significant volume, so Facebook’s trades before that tended to be one-off deals at a low per-share price. In April 2010, Facebook fetched an average price of $9.82 per share on a monthly average basis. One year later, the rate jumped to $31.46.
As of April 5, Facebook shares were trading for an average of $42.72 each — nearly $4 higher than the IPO price.
