Twitter goes public on the New York Stock Exchange today at $26 per share

Shawn Knight

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twitter york stock exchange

It’s been a while in the making but Twitter’s big day under the spotlight has finally arrived. Twitter announced a starting price of $26 per share yesterday via tweet in what is being billed as one of the hottest IPOs since Facebook went public in May of 2012.

Twitter starts trading on the New York Stock Exchange today and will initially offer 70 million shares to the public. At $26 per share, that puts the company’s value at $14.2 billion and we are told there are another 10.5 million shares on tap should demand call for it.

The microblogging platform initially planned to offer shares in the $23 to $25 range but after executives and their bankers made the rounds with money managers to drum up interest, they decided to raise it a buck to $26 in the belief that demand would be hot.

Twitter said in an SEC filing earlier this week that they plan to use funds raised from the IPO for general corporate purposes which includes working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures, to increase their capitalization and financial flexibility and to create a public market for their common stock.

Any bets on how Twitter will do today and over the coming weeks? A strong start would be good for investors but it would mean Twitter left money on the table and a poor showing is obviously not good either. Best bet for Twitter is a somewhat solid pop but nothing too over-the-top. With any luck, they’ll fare better than social networking rival Facebook did a year ago.

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"Any bets on how Twitter will do today and over the coming weeks? A strong start would be good for investors but it would mean Twitter left money on the table and a poor showing is obviously not good either. Best bet for Twitter is a somewhat solid pop but nothing too over-the-top. With any luck, they?ll fare better than social networking rival Facebook did a year ago."

IPOs are unpredictable out of the gate unless there is a nonsense IPO valuation (like there was with FB). As for investors, what the stock does for the first few weeks is noise to the majority of them. They play the long game (several years out), so whether it goes up or down over the next few weeks is of little consequence.
 
How will they do? They'll chill out around 25-30 for a while until they come up with a business plan that will make them some real money. Stuffing a social network with ads hasn't yet proven to be very successful.
 
Actually, they are trading between $44-$50 at the moment. Should be an interesting afternoon.
 
I just read an article last night talking about the number of people (including celebs) that have been abandoning Twitter.
 
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