Facebook's first day!

Facebook Inc. @ $38.23, +$0.23 (+0.6%)  

NASDAQ @ 2478.53, -$30.52 (-1.22%)

 

Click to enlarge, close to return (chart courtesy of Digitallook).

Looks to have come off a peak of $42 in official trading, although there is commentary suggesting that $45 was hit, before settling at just 23 cents above the IPO price. This against a wider index fall of 1.22%.

I still don't fully understand how this works but the 421million shares on offer yesterday are classed as A shares with 1 vote per share, whereas existing shares (held prior to IPO) are B shares with 10 votes per share so have 10 times the voting influence.
The $16bn or so raised from yesterdays listing reads across to an approximate valuation of $104bn for Facebook as a whole.
And with 2011 profits in the region of $1.695bn from revenues of $3.711bn that's $1.88 of profit on revenue of $4.12 per Facebook's estimated 900m users.
Currently a case of pile it high and sell it cheap but going forward the company will obviously take a serious look at how to increase profits (despite Zuckerberg's 56% voting power) and make best use of all that freely given but still private and sensitive personal data.

There had been some delay in determining whether or not Facebook shares were Crest eligible from the off which would have affected clients' ability to trade them through the Crest electronic settlement system and hold them in their electronic dealing accounts. But that now looks to have been resolved and the shares are confirmed as being Crest eligible. 

As with any US share, you will still need to have signed and submitted a W8-BEN form to your broker before you can trade in them of course.

Earlier posts:

- Facebook to begin trading on NASDAQ today.

- - Facebook IPO.