No price spike, but at least investors are interested in Facebook

Like it or hate it, but at least investors are interested in Facebook Inc. In some ways, the social media stock has had a less-than-impressive debut on Friday, with the shares trading just 60 cents (U.S.) above their IPO price of $38 in late afternoon trading. But the volume of shares traded has been spectacular.

With about 40 minutes left in the trading day, 474 million shares have traded hands. That's already well above the IPO record set by General Motors Co. , which saw trading volume of 458 million shares in 2010 following its public offering, according to Dow Jones. (However, as far as overall volume records, it is going to be hard to top Citigroup Inc.'s record volume of 3.8 billion shares in 2009.)

So while Facebook's share price pop might be disappointing, the interest in the stock is clearly strong – so much so, that TD Ameritrade is reporting that Facebook has accounted for about 25 per cent to 29 per cent of the online brokerage's total trading volume on Friday, according to Dow Jones.

But, no, investors don't seem to be entertaining any belief that the spike in trading volume will help publicly traded brokerages in any meaningful way. TD Ameritrade shares were down 0.6 per cent in afternoon trading on Friday. Rival Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. was down 1.7 per cent and ETrade Financial Corp. was down 2 per cent.