Wall St The Week Ahead: Wall Street all a-Twitter over public offering
TWITTER will be the talk of Wall Street this week when the social media company goes public in the stock market’s most anticipated initial public offering since last year’s Facebook.
Twitter is expected to price its IPO on Wednesday evening and begin trading on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange.
Twitter has said it will sell 70m shares at a price between $17 and $20, valuing the online messaging company as much as $11bn, below the $15bn that some analysts had been expecting.
The market will be on alert to see if Twitter follows the fate of last year’s botched Facebook IPO, which was plagued by allocation problems, trading glitches and a selloff. The shares did not recover the IPO price until a year later.
Another event that will grab investors’ attention will be the Labor Department’s release of non-farm payroll figures for October on Friday. The announcement was delayed by the 16-day partial US government shutdown in early October. Some market participants warn that the data could be skewed due to the shutdown.
The week’s economic indicators also include factory orders today, followed by the ISM services index tomorrow. On Thursday, third-quarter gross domestic product and weekly jobless claims will be released.
In addition to the unemployment numbers, US personal income and outlays and the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index are due on Friday.