Tweed Marijuana Inc. is setting up as a win for its early backers, with shares of the company opening their first day of trading far higher than expected.
Shares of Tweed began trading at $4.60 on the TSX Venture exchange, before falling back to the $2.60 range. Either way, that's a big jump.
Tweed executive chairman Bruce Linton told the Huffington Post that he thought the shares would open around 85 cents a piece. The last private financing round was done at just a month ago at the equivalent of 89 cents a share. GMP Securities, which is Tweed's main advisor, arranged that round as well as earlier ones.
The company went public via a combination with a shell company. It now trades under the ticker "TWD" on the venture market.
Medicinal marijuana deals have a lot of buzz right now, with growers looking to take advantage of licenses to supply the federal government with the drug. Tweed has a growing operation in a former chocolate plant near Ottawa.
Investors are moving back into riskier, smaller ventures in a big way, as evidenced by the interest in Tweed and the huge order book for the pending Lumenpulse Lighting IPO. Lumenpulse now has more than $1-billion of orders for $75-million of stock on sale, with the books set to close at midday Friday.