So much for the anti-Facebook IPO.
Twitter — which had hoped to avoid the hype that led Facebook to increase both the price and the number of shares in the run-up to its botched IPO — is also starting to look downright expensive ahead of its market debut.
On Monday, the money-losing microblogging service took the bold step of raising its expected price range to between $23 and $25 a share, up from $17 to $20 a share.
And there’s speculation that the final offering price on Wednesday will go even higher.
At $25 a share, Twitter will boast a higher-price-to-sales ratio than Facebook when it went public at $38 a share in May 2012 — even though Twitter has yet to turn a profit.
This is worrying some on Wall Street.
“We wouldn’t recommend investors invest at a price above $26,” a share, Rick Summers, senior stock analyst at financial research firm Morningstar Inc., told The Post.
It’s not just financial analysts who are concerned that Twitter’s share price is getting frothy.
Wall Street brokers said they’re seeing enormous demand from clients who want the stock but who are worried they won’t be able to get in at a reasonable price.
“It’s going to be a mania,” bemoaned one financial adviser with a large New York brokerage firm.
The adviser said she’s getting requests to buy shares from people — some in their 70s — who don’t know what Twitter is but who are drawn to the hottest name in tech.
She intends to wait until after the “euphoria” of the first day of trading on Thursday to buy the stock for her clients.
Despite rumblings about the lofty price, Wall Street is largely expecting Twitter’s IPO to be a success — unlike Facebook, which saw its stock plunge by one-third after its IPO.
It took more than a year for Facebook shares to recover from the glitch-filled, overpriced IPO. The stock rose 3.9 percent to close at $50.10 on Tuesday.
In fact, many on Wall Street believe in Twitter’s growth prospects and expect the share price to soar higher post-IPO.
Robert Peck, managing director at Atlanta bank SunTrust, said he sees Twitter rising to as much as $50 a share by the end of 2014.
Doug Kass, president of hedge-fund firm Seabreeze Partners Management, has an even bolder prediction: Twitter rising to $45 a share within the first month of trading.
One thing working in Twitter’s favor is its decision to limit the number of shares sold in the IPO, known as the float.
The company will sell 80.5 million shares on Wednesday — less than 10 percent of its shares outstanding.
Professional networking site LinkedIn also kept its float to less than 10 percent when it sold shares at $45 a piece.
The stock doubled in the first day of trading and recently closed at an astounding $224.54.
Facebook, by contrast, increased its float by 25 percent, to a whopping 421.2 million ahead of its IPO, leading to oversupply.