Tweeter Home shares explode on apparent Twitter mix-up

Chuck Mikolajczak
Tweeter Home shares explode on apparent Twitter mix-up

By Chuck Mikolajczak NEW YORK (Reuters) - Excitement for Twitter's coming IPO is running pretty high - so much so that some investors on Friday mistook the nearly worthless stock of long-dead electronics retailer Tweeter for the "tweeting" site, sending shares up more than 1,000 percent. Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, a specialty consumer electronics company that went bankrupt in 2007, saw a its most active day of trading in more than six years even though it has nothing to do with the social media site. The stock, which trades over the counter, closed Thursday at a price of less than a penny a share, and Friday hit a high of 15 cents a share on Friday, before paring gains to trade at 5 cents, a 669 percent rise. More than 11.7 million shares had traded by midday. The volume was the most active trading day for the company since May 10, 2007, when 13.05 million shares were traded and the company reported quarterly results and said it may choose to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. To say the stock is lightly traded in normal times is an understatement, sometimes going several days without even trading 1,000 shares over the course of a full session. However, in the last two weeks Tweeter shares' price and volume ticked higher following Twitter's announcement on September 12 that it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering. The moves on those days were not nearly as extreme, with the stock reaching a high of 3.5 cents, and seeing volume between 200,000 and 1.1 million shares, depending on the day. Tweeter filed for bankruptcy in June of 2007 and its assets were acquired by Schultze Asset Management on July 13, 2007, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A representative for Schultze Asset was not immediately available for comment. Twitter Inc publicly filed its IPO documents on Thursday, setting the stage for one of the most-anticipated debuts in over a year. (Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by David Gaffen and Nick Zieminski)