NEW YORK – It's another first for Facebook stock: a third digit.
Already the fastest company ever to reach $250 billion in market value, the social network operator has jumped over $100 a share, capping a 475 percent rally since September 2012 for the fourth-best performance in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.
"The big seminal event for Facebook was showing they could make significant money and turn themselves into a well-run company," Tim Ghriskey, who helps oversee $1.5 billion as managing director and chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, said by phone. The firm owns Facebook shares.
Facebook climbed 2.2 percent to $101.88 at 12:50 p.m. in New York. It breached the $100 level on a day when technology stocks surged the most since Aug. 26, as Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet and Amazon.com added nearly $100 billion in combined market value after quarterly profit topped estimates.
This isn't Facebook's first flirtation with the $100 level. On July 21, the stock came within 1.7 percent of breaking it. It then became mired in the August stock market sell-off, dropping 14 percent over three days to a two-month low. Since then, it's shown resilience, rallying back 24 percent.
Facebook joins 109 other members of the benchmark index in the three-digit club amid speculation that the company will continue to increase mobile-advertising sales on its application and others. Its ascent comes at a time when stock splits are increasingly rare in an American stock market that is dominated by institutional investors and exchange-traded funds that don't care about the absolute price of a share.
As Facebook's stock has increased, so has the net wealth of its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. His fortune has risen $9.1 billion in 2015, the second-biggest increase for U.S. billionaires behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zuckerberg is the world's eighth-richest person with $43.6 billion.
Along with Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, Facebook is one of a quintet of technology giants that together make up nearly 10 percent of the S&P 500 and more than a third of the Nasdaq 100.
