NEW YORK, NY Nov. 7 (DPI) – Wall Street and the business press may yet conclude that the initial public offering of Twitter (TWTR) shares was mispriced today, as the shares jumped nearly 80% upon freeing to trade on the open market.

But beyond a valuation mistake by investment bankers, there may be another reason for today’s run-up: Speculators bet that Twitter’s new shares would plummet in early trading, and widespread short-covering helped push up shares on the first day.

According to most experts, it’s hard to imagine a so-called short squeeze on a new issue of 70 million shares — after all, squeezes occur when there is a shortage of outstanding shares to buy, and short sellers cannot borrow shares that have not been allocated to investors.

But the marketplace by all accounts did not anticipate Twitter common stock jumping 80% on the first day of trading. Many investors were, some say, “leaning the wrong way.”

Wall Street, though, had a lot at stake in today’s high-profile IPO. Shares in Facebook – the last big tech IPO, in May 2012 — traded down sharply on the first days of trading, amid errors by both underwriters (lead manager: Morgan Stanley) and the NASDAQ exchange, which at one point shut down trading.

So while Twitter’s underwriters – lead book runner this time is Goldman Sachs — were determined to avoid a replay of the Facebook fiasco, the business press picked up this week on plenty of skeptical and cautionary research reports.

To a greater degree than Facebook, which has realized a turnaround in the last six months, Twitter, many analysts say, may never enjoy the business growth and profits to justify a $25 billion valuation, reflected in today’s $47 share price.