Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell remotely, from company headquarters in California.

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 (FB) 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 U.S. IPO ever, trailing only the $19.7 billion raised by Visa (V, Fortune 500) in March 2008 and the $18.1 billion raised by automaker General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) 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.

Who’s selling shares: Zuckerberg plans to sell 30.2 million shares in the IPO offering. That will net Zuckerberg about $1.1 billion.

But Zuckerberg won’t be hanging on to his cash. Facebook said he will use the “substantial majority” of the windfall to cover the massive tax bill he’ll be hit with, thanks to his plan to exercise a large stock-options grant that will increase his ownership stake in the company he founded.

After the offering, Zuckerberg will still hold 503.6 million shares, or about 31% of the company. That stake is worth $19.1 billion at the IPO price.

Venture capital firm Accel Partners, which is the largest shareholder outside of Zuckerberg, is selling 49 million shares in the offering. That’s about a quarter of its Facebook holdings.

– CNNMoney’s Chris Isidore and Maureen Farrell contributed reporting. 

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_topstories/~3/Z2ixQ97lJ78/index.htm

With so many unprecedented and hefty considerations, markets might enjoy today’s complete absence of scheduled economic data as some sort of chance to seek its own equilibrium.  That sentence was actually lifted from an article we wrote in July 2011 when European drama was first beginning to collide with impending Fed policy changes.  The first four days of the week contained plenty of events informing both of those heavy hitters and markets attempted to reconcile those versus the decreasingly significant scheduled econ calendar.  

Back then, we thought that the data-less Friday looked like a decent opportunity for markets to “trade it out,” but as it happened, things didn’t move too much until two weeks later when 10yr yields dropped about 60bps in 5 days in the run up to NFP.  Interestingly enough, today’s data-less Friday is followed by a relatively inconsequential week, just like last time.  And wouldn’t ya know it, the following week ends with NFP Friday.  But before we get too far ahead of ourselves drawing parallels to the past, we should be clear in saying the following:

It doesn’t make any sense to try to get ahead of the market right now.  If you “just knew” that European turmoil would eventually catch up with markets and back in late February/early March that the April government changes in Greece were “sure” to land the Euro-zone right back in the center of market drama, then you win, but the question is: “what now?”  And that’s a question no one can rightfully answer.

 There are some great “probably’s” out there, but ultimately, a lot depends on uncertain variables in the near term future.  There was a poll today indicating that the PRO-bailout crowd was back in the lead in Greece.  If they do win elections in June, it would probably un-do a lot of the recent rally.  

Then there’s the matter of domestic Fed Policy to contend with.  Y’day’s minutes and today’s disproportionately large reaction to Philly Fed numbers speaks two things: a)The Fed is ready to move either closer or further away from stimulus and b) markets smell that blood and have assumed that it’s the impending economic data that will push that decision-making process in one direction or the other.  Simply put, you didn’t see the big nasty volume spike y’day on the Philly Fed Index, you saw a big nasty volume spike on a clue that makes it seem increasingly likely that QE3 isn’t going to be a 4 letter word in June. 

Article source: http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/mortgage_rates/blog/259767.aspx

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Ali Fedotowsky walked away from Facebook (and probably most of her stock options) when she opted to be ABC’s Bachelorette.

Robert Cezar Matei missed his chance to join early Facebook, Square and Instagram teams.

Missing millions hurts. Some people, like Kevin Systrom, went on to make millions after turning down early start-up jobs.

Most live in regret, knowing they let millions of dollars slip through their fingers.

Here are eight talented professionals who came close to being millionaires.

Tagged: Ali Fedotowsky, AliFedotowsky, Entertainment, Facebook, Instagram, Julian Targowski, JulianTargowski, Kevin Systrom, million dollar mistake, millionaires, MillionairesDating, MillionDollarMistake,

Article source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/05/17/just-missed-millions-people-who-left-early-jobs-at-billion-doll/