Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) plans to launch turbos linked to shares in Twitter at NYSE Euronext Amsterdam as soon as the social network is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) later this week.

The Scottish bank said it was gearing up to list Twitter-linked turbos by the end of the week or early next week following Twitter plans to make its debut on the NYSE this week.

Twitter – which allows users to post 140-character messages at a time – had been aiming to sell 70m shares at an initial public offering (IPO) at a price of between $17 and $20 a share, but increased its target to between $23 and $25 on Monday. That means Twitter would float with a market capitalisation of $13.6bn.

RBS’s initial focus will be on Twitter long turbos, while Twitter short turbos will be introduced at a later stage. “Investors anticipating an immediate fall in the share have to be patient for a little bit longer,” the bank said in a newsletter.

RBS said that because of the unknown liquidity of the shares at launch it often issues fewer turbos on new shares compared with existing shares and that, because the volatility is also unknown (and often high in case of IPOs), the buffer is high.

Other social networks have preceded Twitter’s IPO and SRP database shows that there are currently 11,793 products linked to shares in Facebook and 1,674 products linked to those of LinkedIn. The vast majority of these are leverage products issued in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.  However, especially in the US, we have seen a number of registered notes  – issued mainly via Barclays, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, RBC and UBS – linked to Facebook (74 products worth $121m) or LinkedIn (20/$37.8m).

The news about the upcoming RBS turbos comes despite the bank being in the process of selling its structured products business in the Netherlands. RBS said it will transfer its exchange-traded products in the Netherlands – including turbos – to a business unit managed by its markets division which will subsequently be sold or otherwise disposed of through a settlement process.

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