Twitter stock soars on trading debut

Investors scrambled to get their hands on Twitter shares Thursday after the social media site made its trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Twitter shares soared as high as $50 at one stage, more than 90 percent above the $26 a share the company had priced its initial public offering late Wednesday.

The heavily oversubscribed offer of 70 million shares raised $1.82 billion, which the company will use to deliver on its promises of fast sales growth. The huge demand for stock meant some investors had to wait until Thursday to buy.

Twitter announced its first day as a publicly traded company with a brief tweet.

British actor Sir Patrick Stewart, who has more than 720,000 followers on Twitter, was on hand to help ring the opening bell, along with 9-year-old Vivienne Harr, who has more than 22,000 followers after using the service to raise awareness about child slavery, and a representative from the Boston Police Department.

Some market observers were wary of the hype surrounding Twitter’s public debut, particularly considering the company has never turned a profit. 

“I anticipated a very strong open, but when you start to approach these levels this is absolute froth,” Jeffrey Sica of Sica Wealth Management in New Jersey told Bloomberg.

“There is nothing supporting this range. I think this is just way, way above what realistically we should be considering a stable open.”

Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg don’t expect the company to be profitable until 2015.

In early afternoon trading, the stock was up more than 76 percent at $46. 

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