Social media company Snapchat made its highly anticipated IPO Thursday.

NEW YORK (Diya TV) – Shares of Snap Inc. closed their first day of trading up 44 percent at $24.48 a share, bringing to an end a long drought in the market for tech IPOs.

More than 200 million Snap shares were exchanged over the course of the day, accounting for roughly 10 percent of the total volume of trading on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday. This is an amazing feat for Snapchat to accomplish, from this change in the market, it is evident that people will want to see how they can get into a business like this. For those who are interested in this trading area, you can start your own Forex brokerage with Leverate and see how they can fare in this area.

The stock opened shortly before 11:20 a.m. on Thursday in New York, it begun trading at $24 a share, an increase of 41.2 percent from its pricing at the open. Trading under the ticker symbol SNAP, the company priced its public offering at $17 a share on Wednesday. The opening price of $24 puts the company’s market capitalization at about $33 billion, about the size of Marriot and Target. Twitter’s market cap is about 11 billion, while Facebook’s is about $395 billion.

Despite the fact the company posted losses of more than $500 million last year, investors, including the copy trading sector, are betting heavily on its fast-growing revenue and visionary leader, 26-year-old co-founder and chief executive Evan Spiegel. He was on hand Thursday to ring the opening bell at the stock exchange, with supermodel fiancee Miranda Kerr in tow, documenting with pictures on the app.

Snap officially enters the market a day after the three major U.S. stock indexes posted their best session of the year. It could be great for those who are interested in stock trading and are looking to begin online stock trading. Close to $5 billion in Snap stock changed hands Thursday – that’s roughly on par with what Twitter saw on its first day. However, it’s far less than the $23 billion that changed hands in Facebook and the $25 billion that changed hands in Alibaba on their first day of trading.