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Twitter Employees Can Start Selling Their Stock This Week

Feb 15, 2014, 03:19 IST

Andrew Burns, Getty ImagesTwitter CEO Dick Costolo.

An agreement that held Twitter employees from selling their shares of the company's stock is set to expire this weekend.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Twitter employees will be allowed to sell up to 9.9 million shares beginning this Saturday.

This will be the first chance Twitter have had a chance to cash out since the IPO.

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Some investors expect this to bring the stock down in the short term, as when Facebook let its employees sell shares after its public offering - which led to a 6.4% drop.

As Yoree Koh explains in her WSJ piece, this isn't likely to be the case with Twitter:

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This first chunk of shares available for sale is small. It represents just 1.8% of outstanding shares and is mainly to give non-executive employees a way to settle income tax expenses from vesting shares. In comparison, Facebook freed more than 271 million shares - or nearly 13% of those outstanding, in the first lockup.

Nonetheless, expect to see some Twitter employees celebrating their good fortune pretty soon.

A much larger portion of shares will become eligible for sale when a similar agreement expires for big shareholders like Twitter executives and early venture capital backers on May 6.

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