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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
- Twitter's stock is having a stellar year, and a look at its chart suggests the rally isn't over.
- Twitter should continue higher in the near-term, one analyst said.
- With the stock up over 50% this year, it's competing with its 2017 performance for the biggest annual gain since going public.
- Watch Twitter trade live.
Twitter is beating out the rest of the social-media space this year, and it's not even close.
Shares are up 50% with just two weeks left in 2018, handily outperforming global social peers like Facebook, Snap, Tencent and Baidu. The stock is contending with its best annual performance since going public in late 2013.
And a look at the charts suggests even bigger gains lie ahead.
Twitter has appeared to reverse a downtrend on its weekly chart, said Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Jaffray. Should the stock see a close above $37 per share, he said, it could head to $42. Twitter hasn't seen that level since this summer.
"What was resistance is now support," Johnson said Thursday morning in a phone interview, referring to the area around the $36 mark.
Other bullish technical indicators he cited were the stock closing above its 40-week moving average and the appearance of a small inverted head-and-shoulders formation, a technical pattern that suggests a bearish-to-bullish reversal.
And the stock's technical position is gaining attention elsewhere on Wall Street. Twitter shares "blasted through resistance [on Wednesday]," Frank Cappelleri, chief market technician at Instinet, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. "At the very least, it has a defined support zone to fall back upon."
He added that the Global X Funds Social Media ETF (SOCL) - in which Twitter is the top holding - is "trying to break the downtrodden mood it has been in for many months."
Josh Brown, the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, has called Twitter's performance this year the "best kept secret of 2018," at least when compared to Facebook's. It is perhaps even more impressive when considering the problems surrounding the social-media space, with companies facing intense scrutiny over privacy issues and their role in attempts to manipulate elections.
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