It's official: Wall Street #hearts Twitter. Shares of Twitter soared to close almost 73% above their offering price in their first day on the stock market.
Twitter priced its initial public offering Wednesday night at $26 a share. The stock debuted at 10:49 a.m. ET on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange, and the first trade came in at $45.10 a share.
Shares quickly jumped to a high of $50.09 -- a gain of 93% over the IPO price -- before dropping back a bit to close the trading day at $44.90. A price near $45 a share values Twitter at $24.4 billion.
A 'clean' debut: Twitter's early pop is similar to that ofLinkedIn , which more than doubled in its first day on the stock market. But it was Facebook's messy debut on the Nasdaq last year that had some individual investors worried ahead of Twitter's IPO. Luckily for Twitter, its offering went smoothly.
"We tried to have a very clean process [for the IPO] ... the team that worked on it inside the company was very methodical," Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said on CNBC earlier in the morning.
"Phew!" tweeted Anthony Noto, Twitter's top banker at Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) (the IPO's lead underwriter), after trade started.
Twitter was the most actively traded stock in the U.S. on Thursday. More than 117.3 million shares had exchanged hands by the end of the day.
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