So Twitter made a decision this week that I don't think got nearly enough attention outside of business press: they're listing on the New York Stock Exchange, not Nasdaq, and they'll trade under the ticker TWTR. Reporters confirmed it Monday. And look, I know "which exchange" sounds like the most boring possible detail in a story about a company going public. But it's not boring at all if you remember what happened to Facebook.
May 2012, Facebook IPOs on Nasdaq. Ticker FB. And Nasdaq's own systems basically choke on the order volume — trades get delayed something like half an hour, a bunch of orders never confirm properly, some people ended up buying shares they didn't mean to buy or not getting shares they thought they'd bought. It turned into a legal mess that dragged on for over a year, brokerages suing Nasdaq, the SEC getting involved, the whole thing. Facebook's stock also just tanked for months afterward, which wasn't really Nasdaq's fault, but the botched debut didn't help anybody trust the process.
So when Twitter picks NYSE instead, I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it needed to be some genius strategic insight either. It's just: don't be the second high-profile tech IPO to get humiliated by the same exchange's plumbing. Not exactly rocket science. NYSE has its own history of hiccups obviously, nobody's system is bulletproof, but optics matter here and Twitter clearly wanted distance from the FB memory.
What's more interesting to me, honestly, is what's in the S-1 they made public a couple weeks back. Twitter's still losing money, not a shock, most of these companies are, but the growth numbers are the part people keep chewing over. Revenue's climbing fast, ad revenue especially, but user growth isn't accelerating the way you'd want it to if you're trying to justify a huge valuation on the "this is the next big platform" story. I'm not a stock guy. I don't even have a brokerage account, my dad's the one who called me last night asking if he should "get in on Twitter" like I'm some kind of analyst instead of a guy who writes a blog nobody reads. I told him I have no idea, wait for the actual pricing in a few weeks, don't buy in on hype. That's the extent of my financial wisdom, take it or leave it.
I'll say this much as an actual opinion though: I think the ticker choice tells you Twitter's leadership is more careful and more image-conscious than people give them credit for. This is a company that still can't fully get its own timeline algorithm right (still no edit button, still no way to easily filter your feed, don't get me started) but when it comes to the money and the optics around the money, they're being pretty deliberate. Two different muscles, I guess.
Unrelated complaint while I'm here: I finally got back into GTA Online this week after basically giving up on it the first weekend it launched, and it is still a mess. Lost a character entirely on Tuesday night, second time it's happened to a friend of mine too. Rockstar's apparently been handing out in-game cash to people who got wiped which is a nice gesture but doesn't really fix "the servers eat your progress sometimes." I get that the scale of what they built is enormous, multiplayer GTA is not a small thing to pull off, but two and a half weeks out from launch feels like a long time to still be losing save data. Anyway.
Back to Twitter for a second. The actual IPO pricing and the trading debut are still weeks off, so this is all preamble, the boring-but-important administrative stuff before the exciting stuff. But I think the exchange decision is worth remembering when TWTR does start trading, because if the debut goes smooth, some of the credit genuinely belongs to a decision made in mid-October that most people already forgot about by the time the opening bell actually rings.
Also, side note, does anyone else feel like every tech company IPO now gets covered like a sporting event? Countdown clocks, live blogs, "expert" panels on cable news arguing about valuation multiples. I miss when this stuff was just, you know, a company selling shares. Maybe that's a sign I'm getting old and cranky. Probably.