Twiiter SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter’s stock open

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter’s stock opened so high that one analyst has already downgraded it to a sell.

Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research, an independent research firm, sent a note to clients on Thursday morning

Mr. Wieser, who had a price target of $30 on Twitter before the shares began trading, wrote, “With a price that pushes into the high 30s and beyond, Twitter is simply too expensive.”

He said that to justify the $45 price today, Twitter would have to generate more than $6 billion in annual revenue by 2018. (This year’s revenue is projected to be about one-tenth that level.)

He urged investors interested in Internet companies to buy Facebook stock instead. “To the extent that loftier-than-we-expect revenue expectations are realized by Twitter, there would seem to be at least a comparable chance that loftier-than-we-expect revenue expectations would be realized by Facebook, too. The two companies are a long way from being directly competitive, even as they both ride many similar underlying trends and capture much in the way of market share from the digital advertising industry’s incumbents.”