Facebook Closes at $38.23, Nearly Flat on Day Shares of the social network giant closed at $38.23, just 0.6 percent above the initial public offering price - a price that represented 100 times historical earnings. After a delayed opening, shares of Facebook began trading around 11:30 a.m., at $42.05. But shares in the company fell soon afterward, repeatedly testing the offering price as a floor. Buying by Facebook's army of bankers appears to have kept the stock from falling even further, and by mid-afternoon shares had climbed back to about $41.06. Trading for the third-largest I.P.O. was very heavy, with more than 566 million Facebook shares changing hands. That volume easily topped the previous record for an I.P.O., the November 2010 debut of General Motors. It's unclear what was behind the drop, though some I.P.O. experts guessed that technical glitches may have prompted some panicked selling. The Nasdaq OMX Group posted a number of market status updates during the day, warning that some trade execution messages had been delayed. A little after 1 p.m., Nasdaq said that it is working on delivering those pending execution notices. The technical problems and the lack of a pop in Facebook shares seemed to weigh on other Web stocks. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index ended the day down 1.24 percent. Other broader indexes were lower. Zynga, the maker of CityVille and other Facebook games closed down 13.4 percent, with trading in its share having been halted twice on Friday. Groupon ended down 6.7 percent, and LinkedIn fell 5.9 percent. Andrew M. Brooks, head of United States equity trading at T. Rowe Price, said investors appeared to be betting against the Web start-ups. "This whole group has gotten a lot of interest and hype," he said. There are others who want to take the other side of this phenomenon. Facebook's had been expected to open at 11 a.m. but did not. The delay and reports that Nasdaq was encountering problems with entries and cancellations unnerved participants, said Sal Arnuk, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading. An investor in tech companies who declined to be identified said he believed some portion of the people who had bought stock in other social stocks, especially Zynga, were doing so as a proxy for Facebook. Chrisine Hauser and Nick Wingfield contributed reporting.