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Twitter
Eighteen months after Facebook’s (NASDAQ: FB) disastrous public trading debut, the Twitter IPO was a smash success.
The popular social media site is up a whopping 86% in its debut today. Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) priced its IPO at $26 yesterday, above the original anticipated range of $17-$20. It’s currently trading at just under $48.
The $14.1 billion the company raised makes the Twitter IPO the second-most lucrative debut for any tech stock, trailing on the Facebook IPO but ahead of Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) 2004 IPO.
Twitter’s monster debut has already given it $26 billion market cap.
Some – including yours truly – thought the mega-hype surrounding the Twitter IPO would inflate the initial stock price so high that it would come crashing down the same way Facebook did. That may still happen. But Twitter is already off to a much better start than Facebook.
Facebook shares were essentially flat when the company debuted on May 18, 2012. From there things only got worse, as shares plummeted from their $38 IPO price all the way to $18 by the end of August of that year.
The technology stock has since recovered, gaining more than 75% year to date and trading as high as $54 in late October. But early investors in Facebook’s IPO took it on the chin for more than a year. It wasn’t until August 2 of this year that Facebook managed to top its $38 IPO price.
Twitter doesn’t have that same problem. For one day at least, the social media stock has lived up to its considerable hype.