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posted by CoolHand on Thursday April 30 2015, @06:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the at-least-someone-tweets-something-that-matters dept.

Twitter was due to announce its earnings for the first quarter of the year after close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, where the company is listed.

Except it turns out that somebody thought it would be a good idea to release this information early, on the technology-led NASDAQ run Investor Relations page for Twitter.

Initially it seemed no one really noticed the error, until a well-placed tweet highlighted the mistake and revealed Twitter's disappointing results.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32511932

At one point in the final hours of trading, the stock had lost more than $8 BILLION.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday April 30 2015, @09:07AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday April 30 2015, @09:07AM (#177007) Journal
    The price of the shares is set by the belief from investors that they can sell them for more in the future. Generally, a company has a valuation of assets that sets a low sensible bounds (i.e. if you closed the company and sold everything that they own, you'd get this much, so valuing the company lower than that doesn't make sense). Everything else is based on belief in the future value of the company. And this, of course, has feedback effects because if the belief that a company will do well in the future makes it more valuable, then the belief that people will believe in the future that the company will do well also makes it more valuable (and so on). This is why a leak like this can knock a lot off the stock price - it likely went up because people anticipated that it would go up once their earnings were published, then discovered they were wrong and sold quickly, which meant that more people were selling than buying, which meant that the price went down.
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