LinkedIn share price more than doubles in NYSE debut

NEW YORK (Reuters) - LinkedIn Corp's shares more than doubled in their public trading debut on Thursday, evoking memories of the investor love affair with Internet stocks during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

Shares of the online professional social networking company closed at .25, 109 percent above their initial public offering price. They rose as high as .97, in their first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Just two weeks ago, LinkedIn proposed a price range for the IPO that valued it at just over billion. Less than a decade ago, the company was nothing more than an ambitious idea and a computer in one man's living room.
Now, its .9 billion market value makes it larger than Harley Davidson Inc, Moodys Corp and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.
"It seems to bring back memories of the tech bubble," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. "Based on what I know it seems like investors are a little overly enthusiastic."
One hedge fund manager who flipped his holdings in the low-80's described how difficult it was to get shares. "I got 500 shares and was told to consider myself lucky," he said.
"There are billion-dollar institutions that are not getting any stock," he said, recounting something he learned from salesperson at one of the lead banks.
LinkedIn is the first prominent U.S. social networking company to publicly test how hungry investors are for social media companies such as Facebook, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga.
Such exuberant debut trading in recent years has been the prerogative of Chinese Internet stocks. LinkedIn shares marked the biggest first-day price jump since shares of Qihoo 360 Technology Co, China's third most-popular Internet company, rose 134 percent in their NYSE debut.
Like Facebook, Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn allows users to create profile pages displaying a picture and details about themselves.
While Facebook often has more informal profiles that may include a ... (reuters)