Facebook shares post biggest single-day gain

NEW YORK — Facebook’s stock is seeing its biggest single-day gain since it began trading in May — a sign that the social media company’s complicated relationship with Wall Street has finally hit a bright spot.

It’s been a rough five months, and it’s too early to tell whether investors’ optimism is here to stay. But on Wednesday they latched on to clear signs of growth in the company’s third-quarter earnings report. Several analysts upgraded the stock.

Besides posting quarterly results that inched past Wall Street’s expectations, Facebook also gave details for the first time on how much money it made from mobile ads. This has been a concern since before its initial public offering. Although the majority of 1 billion people who use Facebook each month now access it using a mobile device, the 8-year-old company was created in the age of desktop computers, for Web pages. Facebook now calls itself a “mobile-first” company, but it only started showing mobile ads earlier this year.

On Tuesday, Facebook said that nearly $153 million of its $1.26 billion revenue came from mobile advertisements. The rate of advertising revenue growth also accelerated since the second quarter.

Shares of based Facebook Inc., based in Menlo Park, Calif., rose $4.34, or 22.3 percent, to $23.84 on Wednesday. It’s by far the stock’s biggest one-day gain since Facebook went public on May 18. The stock is still down 37 percent from its $38 initial public offering price.