Excitement for Twitter’s upcoming stock market debut got a little out of hand on Friday, after investors who couldn’t stand the wait purchased 4.2 million shares of bankrupt electronics company Tweeter, sending its stock price soaring.
Twitter is expected to go public in November under the ticker symbol TWTR. Tweeter Home Entertainment, a electronics chain that went bankrupt in November 2008, still had stock languishing at less than one cent per share under the ticker symbol TWTRQ. The stage was set for an epic misunderstanding.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Tweeter’s stock skyrocketed when trading opened on Friday, moving up from less than a cent to over 15 cents a share, a whopping 1,500 percent increase.
Some investors soon realized their mistake and returned the shares, but hours later the stock was still trading over 500 percent higher than where it began Friday morning.
Tweeter’s zombie stock first twitched a bit last month, after Twitter revealed it had decided to take its business public. But it wasn’t until they released their ticker symbol yesterday that the long-dead company clawed its way out of the grave.
After a few frenzied hours of trading, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority stepped in, putting down the newly-revived stock with extreme prejudice at 12:42 p.m. EST. “An extraordinary event has occurred or is ongoing that has had a material effect on the marketplace for the” stock, a notice read just before the regulatory body halted all Tweeter trades.
No word yet on how Facebirk, LunkedIn or Guggle stocks reacted to the news.
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