Twitter results divide Wall Street, investors dump stock

“We remain firmly in the latter camp…” said Deutsche Bank, one of one at least five brokerages that raised target prices or ratings on Twitter’s stock on Thursday.

Investors were not convinced, driving down Twitter’s shares 21 percent in premarket trading a day after the company reported its slowest pace of user growth in recent history.

Deutsche Bank, in a note entitled “Great Quarter, Aside From The Most Important Metric”, said it was impressed by Twitter’s improving monetization and expected slowing user growth to reverse during 2014.

The broker, which sees Twitter on its way to 1 billion user, maintained a “buy” rating on the stock and raised its price target to $65 from $50.

Twitter shares were trading at $51.95 before the bell.

UBS, on the other side of the argument, issued a “sell” recommendation on the stock and cut its price target to $42 from $45. It was one of at least six brokerages to cut their target prices or recommendations on Twitter’s shares.

“A lack of mainstream adoption or a more simplified use case was a worry of ours coming out of the IPO and seems to have come to the fore faster than we had anticipated,” UBS analyst Eric Sheridan said in a note.

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