Twitter is whipsawing after posting its 2nd ever quarterly profit

Thomson Reuters

FILE PHOTO - People holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in Warsaw

• Twitter reported first quarter earnings on Wednesday that topped analyst expectations.
• The company said it earned an adjusted $0.16 per share where Wall Street had expected $0.12.
• Shares rose more than 5% in early trading before giving up their gains.
• Follow Twitter's stock price in real-time here.

Shares of Twitter surged more than 5% in early trading Wednesday after the social network posted its second profitable quarter in a row by GAAP standards. They have since given up the bulk their gains and are up less than 1% ahead of the opening bell.

For the first quarter of 2018, Twitter said it earned an adjusted $0.16 per, topping the $0.12 gain that analysts surveyed by Bloomberg were expecting. Revenue came in at $664.87 million, beating the $605.93 million that was anticipated.

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"We made meaningful progress in our ongoing safety and information quality work in Q1, and we are continuing to invest in improving the quality of content and the overall health of the conversation on Twitter," the company said in a letter to shareholders.

Monthly active users, a closely watched metric for social media companies, grew by 6 million to 336 million, slightly more than analysts had expected. The company does not disclosed daily active users.

Twitter also raised its guidance for the second quarter, saying it expects EBITDA of between $245 million and $265 million. Analysts polled by Bloomberg previously expected $218 million for the three-months ending June 31.

Twitter is widely seen as being at risk from any new data privacy regulations in the wake of Facebook's scandal with the firm Cambridge Analytica, which exposed 87 million users private data. It has been harshly criticized for its response to Russian bots flooding its platform during the 2016 US presidential election.

"There's just been a continued global interest in news and information that's a good tailwind for Twitter, especially as their products improve," Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, told Bloomberg News. "They're iterating the product more in the last two years than they have in the past seven."

Twitter is up 28% so far in 2018.

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