It has become all too clear that Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has no serious suitors, and now, Twitter stock is careening lower.

Ordinarily, any time a stock tumbles as far as TWTR has, as fast as it has, it’s worth at least a cursory look in search of value. The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets and you can hear the sounds of cannon and all those other well-worn cliches.

But there’s another hoary old Wall Street phrase investors would do well to heed with Twitter stock:

Don’t try to catch a falling knife.

The Next Challenge for Twitter

TWTR is entering a dangerous new phase of having to justify its valuation — and it can’t. That’s why shares are spinning out of control.

The last, best reason to own Twitter stock was the promise that Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS) or Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) or even Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) would move to acquire the company. Even Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) were rumored to have some interest.

Any Twitter takeout at a premium would have been a huge relief to long-suffering TWTR shareholders. It seemed as if some of the biggest names tech were willing to get into a bidding war over the stagnant, misguided social media player. That had current holders and opportunistic traders saying “ka-ching!”

These putative suitors started dropping out at the end of last week. Salesforce — TWTR’s last, best hope — looks to be a dead bid too. It sounds like CEO Marc Benioff very much wants the property, but his shareholders emphatically do not.

The possibility of a takeout premium was doing a lot more heavy lifting for the Twitter stock price than its growth prospects. Now that a bid won’t be forthcoming, the market has to go back to concentrating on things like stagnant user growth, stillborn live-streaming initiates and whatever else TWTR has been spitballing.

Twitter Stock: Look Out Below!

Twitter shares already were off about 15% year-to-date before Monday’s action, and even those gains were because of the M&A potential.

So much for that.

A stock that went public at $26 a share once again trades below $20. Worse, TWTR has lost more than 50% since the closing price on its first day of trading.

Click to Enlarge That TWTR stock is about to blow support at its 50-day moving average a couple of weeks after carving out a death cross — and still isn’t oversold — isn’t particularly reassuring, either.

To those who continue to shout themselves hoarse saying “long and strong,” if Twitter is such a great investment, why does no one want to buy it? Heck, even Microsoft gifted LinkedIn Corporation (NYSE:LNKD) with a date to the prom.

When an NFL player on his fifth team in five years gets waived and absolutely no other team in the league picks him up — despite the league’s 100% injury rate — that tells you something.

If some of the smartest, most aggressive companies in tech don’t want to buy out Twitter stock, why would you?

As of this writing, Dan Burrows did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.