, Columnist
You Feel Lucky, Punk? Then Invest in Twitter IPO
The only reason to invest in an IPO is if you think the company will outdo the market's estimates.
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Yesterday, Twitter tweeted the announcement that it was filing for an initial public offering. USA Today explores whether retail investors can get a piece of the action. So let's look at whether retail investors (or you lucky few with "most favored investor status" at a major financial institution) should put their money into Twitter.
The first way to look at it is to carefully examine Twitter's profit-making potential. Here's the catch: We have no idea of its profit-making potential. The IPO documents aren't yet public, but it doesn't seem likely that they currently have any profits. There are all sorts of theories about how they totally could make profits, but not so many theories about how they currently are.