It's Twitter IPO Day

Shares priced at $26, will start trading at 9:30am
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 7, 2013 7:31 AM CST
It's Twitter IPO Day
The Twitter bird logo is on an updated phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday Nov. 6, 2013.   (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

At 9:30am today, Twitter starts trading on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: TWTR). The microblogging company priced shares at $26, which was higher than the expected $23 to $25 range and values the company at $18.34 billion—more than Macy's and Bed Bath & Beyond, USA Today reports. "We're going to see enormous trading volume," says one expert, who predicts the share price will increase by the time markets close today, but will eventually settle back down.

That "enormous trading volume" could lead to technical glitches, some fear, but the NYSE did a test run and says everything should run smoothly. Twitter is selling 70 million shares, far fewer than the 421 million sold in Facebook's IPO, and that's not the only thing the company is doing differently than Facebook: It purposely did not price the shares too high (even though they're priced much higher than the $17 to $20 Twitter originally announced) because it doesn't want to create the bubble-like Facebook did, causing the stock to peak and then quickly lose value, The Week reports. (To pass the time until the IPO, click to read about the drunken conversation that launched Twitter.)

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