Facebook shares end flat on Day 1 of trading

The Facebook logo appears on a display inside the NASDAQ Marketsite in Times Square Thursday, May 17, 2012, in New York. Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the high end of its expected range. If extra shares reserved to cover additional demand are sold as part of the transaction, Facebook Inc. and its early investors stand to reap as much as $18.4 billion from the IPO. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Facebook’s long-awaited stock market debut did not live up to all the hype as the social network’s shares closed the first trading day on a flat note with technical glitches at the Nasdaq stock exchange sending confusing signals to investors.

After rising to an intra-day peak of $45 apiece, the shares ended at $38.23, up only by 0.61 per cent from the $38 offer price.

Friday began on a promising note for Mark Zuckerberg and his team at Facebook as he rang Nasdaq’s opening bell amid great fanfare and cheering from the company’s Menlo Park headquarters.

All eyes were then set on Nasdaq where shares of the company with the ticker symbol ‘FB’ were to begin trading at 1100 hrs.

Soon after the start of trading, the stock price of $38, which Facebook had set as its offering price, remained “unchanged”.

Around 1113 hrs, Nasdaq issued a system status update noting “a delay in delivering the opening print”.

When the stock did begin trading at a little after 1130 hrs, it rose quickly to the $42.05 level, up by almost 11 per cent.

During the day, Facebook stock touched a high of $45 and low of $38.

It has a market capitalisation of $104.81 billion.

However, the optimism soon faded away as share price began falling back to the 38 dollar level.