By the numbers: Twitter vs. Facebook IPOs

Facebook's IPO was considered an early bust while Twitter's has been deemed a success. In terms of orderly market activity, that's without question. Ditto for anyone who acquired stock at the IPO price. In fact, the Twitter IPO may signal that other social media companies can successfully raise money by going public. But what about prices for the average investor?

Ten days is admittedly early to rule on the success of a stock launch. That said, we can't resist taking a peek at the data to compare how each stock did in its first 10 business days compared to overall market performance -- and each other.

The graphs below show the set IPO price, first-day-trading opening and closing prices and then subsequent closing prices for Facebook and Twitter. Facebook's graph starts on May 18, 2012; Twitter's on Nov. 7, 2013. Each stock is compared to the NASDAQ Composite for the same days (but the NASDAQ index is divided by 100 in order to be at roughly the same scale as an individual stock), since it wouldn't be fair to compare one company's stock price during a time the overall stock market was rising with the price of another stock when the market was slumping.

Conclusion? Facebook clearly trended downward after its $42/share opening, finishing its 10-day stretch at $27.72. Twitter, meanwhile, has been considerably more stable since its $45.10 opening, trading largely in the low 40s and closing yesterday at $41.05. (The NASDAQ composite during both times didn't show any major movement.)

You can see the trends in the graphs below.

NASDAQ composite is divided by 100 to put it on the same scale as Facebook's stock price. Source: Yahoo and Google Financial data$(function () { var chart; Highcharts.setOptions({ colors: ['#EAB61C', '#99A95F'] }); $(document).ready(function() { $("#interactiveGraph2").show(); chart = new Highcharts.Chart({ chart: { renderTo: 'containerq2', type: 'line' }, title: { text: 'Twitter IPO' }, subtitle: { text: 'How Twitter\'s stock price fared vs. the NASDAQ composite in its first 10 days' }, xAxis: { categories: [ 'IPO', 'Open', 'Close', 'Day2', 'Day3', 'Day4', 'Day5', 'Day6', 'Day7', 'Day8', 'Day9', 'Day10'], title: { text: '' }, }, yAxis: { min: 0, title: { text: '' }, }, legend: { layout: 'vertical', backgroundColor: '#FFFFFF', align: 'right', verticalAlign: 'top', x: -15, y: 50, floating: true, shadow: true }, credits: { enabled: false }, tooltip: { formatter: function() { return ''+ '$' + this.y + ' (' + this.series.name + ')'; } }, plotOptions: { column: { pointPadding: 0.2, borderWidth: 0 } }, series: [{ name: 'Twitter', data: [26, 45.10, 44.90, 41.65, 42.90, 41.90, 42.60, 44.69, 43.98, 41.14, 41.75, 41.05] }, { name: 'NASDAQ', data: [39.36, 39.36, 38.57, 39.19, 39.20, 39.20, 39.66, 39.73, 39.86, 39.49, 39.32, 39.21] } ] }); }); }); NASDAQ composite is divided by 100 to put it on the same scale as Twitter's stock price. Source: Yahoo and Google Financial data

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