Trade Alert – Everything you need to know about $TWTR and locking in some $GSVC profits

I’m so disappointed with how Twitter’s management and bankers have brought this company public today that I don’t know that I’ll ever invest in Twitter.

See, by my calculations, $TWTR just left $1.6 billion of shareholder money on the table by pricing their 80 million shares of stock they’ve sold $20 under where the market is today. If they’d sold the stock at the $50 level it actually hit intraday at one point early this morning, investors in Twitter would now have an extra $2 billion to invest in growing their company for the long-term. This Twitter IPO was, exactly as I’d predicted, wildly underpriced by its management and bankers, and that is a travesty for shareholders in the long-run.

The reason why people call this $TWTR IPO a success and why the Facebook $FB IPO, which got every darn dollar out of its IPO it could for shareholders, is called a failure is because the big dogs get to flip their insider shares for a quick double.

Meanwhile, as a long-term shareholder, I’d much rather have the company raised as much money as possible on the IPO to bolster our bank account instead of some hedge fund manager’s returns.

I wrote Monday in an article called The Right Price to Pay for Twitter after the IPO, “If you can get $TWTR before the IPO and/or under $25 a share, I do think it’s a buy. I think it’s being foolishly underpriced by its bankers and executives and that the stock is likely to trade at least over $35-40 a share when it finally does hit the market later this week, and I wouldn’t want to be aggressive in buying much if any at those prices early on.”

I thought it would take a couple weeks to go to $50. Turned out that it only took a couple hours in this bubble-blowing bull market instead. I repeat that I am not buying $TWTR today and don’t plan on buying it any time soon either.

I’m not going to short Twitter, though. Think of it this way, would you rather short $PCLN at $60 billion valuation or $TWTR at a $25 billion valuation?

$25 billion valuation for Twitter is about 50x this year’s revenues. That’s bubblicious, no? Step back for a moment and wonder to yourself if with the endless hoopla and Good Morning America coverage of the $TWTR IPO, are we here yet? “In a stunning development, America Online Inc. $AOL announced plans to acquire Time Warner Inc. for roughly $182 billion in stock and debt Monday, creating a digital media powerhouse with the potential to reach every American in one form or another.”

Surely, even the most bullish of you out there, are you not the least bit worried that the valuations of stocks like $TSLA and $TWTR, etc aren’t somewhat similar to $AOL and $LVLT, etc in the year 2000? AOL and Level 3 are still around, but their stocks are down 97 and 99% respectively from their highs.

And finally, as I’d noted a couple weeks ago, I bought $GSVC puts a couple weeks ago and with the stock crashing now, I think it’s time to lock some of these $GSVC put profits in. Selling 1/3 of my highest priced strikes to lock in profits of about a double here.