Twitter Employees Can Start Selling Their Stock This Week

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

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.

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:

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.