Twitter sets IPO stock price between $17 and $20

Twitter said in a regulatory filing that it will raise as much as $1.6 billion by selling between 70 and 80.5 million shares priced between $17 and $20 each.

• Twitter will be the biggest technology IPO since Facebook went public in May 2012. 
• It will list on the NYSE.
•  It plans to sell 70 million shares between $17 and $20 each for a possible take of $1.6 billion. 
• Shares will trade under the ticker "TWTR."
• 11/4/13 update: Twitter boosts IPO price; sees shares priced $23-$25

Twitter disclosed on Thursday that it planned to price its eagerly awaited initial public offering at $17 a share to $20 a share, as it readies a road show for investors.

The company plans to sell 70 million shares. At the midpoint of the price range, the social network would raise nearly $1.3 billion. And the offering would value Twitter on a fully diluted basis at more than $12 billion.

That would make Twitter four times as big as AOL, but only a fraction of Facebook, which has a market value of more than $127 billion.

Company executives and their advisers will crisscross the country, presenting their case in a series of meetings starting on Monday in Washington and Baltimore.

Twitter has also moved up the pricing of its offering by more than a week, to Nov. 6. That means that the social network would then begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker symbol “TWTR,” the next day.

The IPO is expected to raise $1 billion to $1.5 billion. It will not be the biggest in terms of size — Plains GP Holdings, an energy company, raised $2.8 billion last week — but the Twitter deal is one of the most hotly anticipated offerings since Facebook‘s market debut last year.