More Twitter IPO Madness: Shares In TW Telecom Go From $30 To $300 In ...

TW Telecom trades under ticket TWTC - Photo credit: Wikipedia

Following in Facebook's footsteps, the announced Twitter IPO is already wreaking havoc in the world of electronic trading. Just a few days after a penny stock saw its valuation surge 700% given the closeness of its ticker to Twitter's, TW Telecom, which trades under the symbol TWTC, forced the Nasdaq to cancel trades as the value of the stock reportedly went from $30 to $300 in less than a minute.

Just before 8:40 AM on Thursday in New York, shares in TW Telecom went on a frenzying ride that took the company's market capitalization from about $4.4 billion to $44 billion, reported. Nasdaq, the exchange where TWTC trades, was forced to come out with a response, cancelling what it called 'clearly erroneous' transactions, presumably under the impression that someone, or something, was trying to trade Twitter stock.

Nasdaq didn't acknowledge the crazy swing in value that Zerohedge pointed out, though, referring to about 25 trades executed between 9:30 and 9:31 AM at values of $31.18 or above. Nasdaq's own pre-market trading data shows two trades at $32.23, in blocks of 900, coming in exactly at 9:30.

Bloomberg terminals reveal 24 executed trades at exactly 9:30:00 coming from multiple exchanges, priced between $32.07 and $32.36, all of which have been canceled. Data indicate the stock hit a 52-week high this morning, changing hands at $32.39. Bloomberg's data doesn't record the pre-market trades referenced by Zerohedge; in his post, Tyler Durden's illustration was a screenshot of a Bloomberg screen showing the trades.

Neither Nasdaq nor TW Telecom responded Forbes ' requests for comments.

The speculation is that 'yet another algo went berserk,' according to Durden, who references the crazy move experienced by Tweeter last Friday. Tweeter Home Entertainment is a bankrupt company that used to trade under the ticker symbol TWTRQ, which, as my colleague Steve Schaefer reported, was forced to change its ticker to THEGQ after the stock went haywire last Friday. Tweeter, obviously, saw its value fall all the way back to a penny.

In its recently filed IPO documents, Twitter, the social network, announced it plans to list its shares under TWTR. Confused investors, or computers, bid Tweeter's value up like crazy in what was an obvious mistake. The same appears to be the case with TW Telecom, a company that counts with an interesting roster of investors including Southwestern Asset Management, billionaire James Simons' Renaissance Technologies, Goldman Sachs, Steve Cohen's SAC Capital, and George Soros.

Shares in TW Telecom were changing hands at $30.36, a 2.3% gain, by 2:00 PM in New York.