Twitter shares Wednesday closed at $42.60, down 5.5 from their opening price last week — proving once again that the early bird into a tech IPO often gets cheated.
A story in The Post last week showed hot tech IPOs often wilt after their first five days of trading — giving the patient investor an advantage over those rushing in on Day 1.
In fact, waiting a week to invest in a randomly selected basket of nine hot tech initial public offerings over the last 15 years would have given the patient investors a 63 percent higher return compared with those who jumped in on the opening price.
Twitter shares opened Nov. 7 at $45.10 — playing true to the form revealed by The Post’s research.
The formula worked when it came to Facebook, Groupon, Yahoo!, Pandora, Amazon, Zynga and LinkedIn.
Out of the 10 stocks, including Twitter, only Google and Yahoo! were more expensive a week after they first sold shares to the public.
Of course, whether Twitter is a good buy even at a 5.5 percent discount to the open remains a hot topic of debate.
In Europe, investors are already starting to pile into warrants that predict Twitter’s shares will drop to below $28 a share by next spring, Bloomberg News reported.
“We have seen strong interest on the short side ever since Twitter started trading above its IPO price,” Heiko Geiger of Bank Vontobel Europe told Bloomberg.