Shares in the 140-character social network Twitter jumped 80% before falling back slightly to $46.10 each in the first few minutes of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Share in twitter were launched at $26 per share, but a huge demand rapidly pushed that price up 73% with more than 13 million shares traded.
The Twitter flotation is the biggest technology IPO since the troubled Facebook launch on the Nasdaq in 2012, with Facebook stock taking more than a year to recover its early slump, with the stock widely considered overvalued. The strong performance of Twitter’s shares in the opening day, however, implies that its stock may have been slightly undervalued – which is much less of an issue.
Twitter is selling 70 million shares, raising more than $1.82 billion (£1.14 billion) for the company which has 232 million active users sending 500 million tweets per day, but is yet to make a profit.