Facebook Makes Stock

Market Debut

May 18, 2012 6:27 AM

A sign welcoming Facebook is flashed on a screen outside the NASDAQ stock exchange at Times Square, May 18, 2012. (credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GettyImages)

MENLO PARK (CBS13/CBSNewYork) – Wall Street get ready!

Valued at $104 billion dollars, Facebook is on track to become the biggest initial public offering in history when it starts trading today.

Facebook’s 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg stands to make $20 billion on the IPO.

Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time in front of a sea of applauding Facebook employees.

However, the market is delaying the sale of shares of the social media website to keep things as orderly as possible. Facebook won’t begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market until 8 a.m. Pacific time under the ticker symbol FB.

The initial stock price for investors is $38 a share.

Some analysts are advising the public to not buy into the hype.

“Wait about a month after the stock has been released. The mutual fund institutional investors are going to be the major ones buying up the stock,” Ryan Mack said. “So when the stock does actually open I believe it will probably go between $90 and $100 a share. Let the hype go down, let the euphoria die down.”

Investment banks underwriting the IPO get the first crack at shares, selling them to their best clients, while retail investors get their shot dead last.

As part of a pre-celebration of the IPO, Zuckerberg and Facebook employees hung out at the Menlo Park campus for an all-night Hack-A-Thon trying to create new programs and applications that could one day improve the site.

The company was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. At the end of 2004, the website had about one million users. Now, 901 million people use Facebook to keep in touch and share photos, videos and opinions.