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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: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:26AM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Thursday April 30 2015, @11:26AM (#177035)

    I took an economics course in college before the "new economy" or "Internet economy" or whatever happened, so I learned about ways to value companies based on actual revenues, cash flows, and other stuff. This was before anyone could have a stupid idea and get venture capital and burn through millions and finally sell the company to Marissa Meyer who overpays by billions because she's a photogenic airhead. So I have no idea what I am talking about. But it seems to me that if a company can lose a huge chunk of market cap because of some early report like this, then that "value" wasn't really value, but a stock price correction because people had no idea what the company was worth in the first place. I haven't studied Twitter's revenue model or anything, but I see an article from Feb 2015 that says its stock price had already fallen by half from its peak, so why would anyone price in $8B in future gains? See, this is where I went wrong. I would say predicting a stock that has lost half its value to rebound when there's no clear way for the company to make money was silly, but then I learned economics before the Internet era and I'm a dinosaur who lives in a basement and clips coupons to buy pizza rolls. BTW I am long on Totino. Very long.

    Read it and weep: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472 [bbc.com]

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday April 30 2015, @09:10PM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 30 2015, @09:10PM (#177259) Journal

    Same here and I agree except you're missing or discounting part of the picture, the new part: information as capital/assets.

    How many use Twitter? How many have ever used Twitter? How many have read a tweet? How many do so daily regardless of delivery method? How many have quoted Twitter? How many links are there to tweets and content/links inside tweets? How often is Twitter referenced by others in less direct ways? What are the relations between different data? How uniquely does the data profile different people, uses, content,…? How do different people, companies, governments/institutions, and organizations use Twitter? How many will give you pizza roll rebates on Twitter? How many new people etc. will use Twitter in the future?

    All of those numbers are huge (except maybe the pizza roll one). A lot of companies etc. consider it normal to have both a Facebook page and a Twitter account (or several) and most use it for customer interaction and public relations/self-advertising. Twitter (or anything that replaces it but functions more or less the same way) isn't going away anytime soon.

    Some people think the data Twitter gathers and/or has access to is worth a lot of money to either themselves or to others, huge sums of money continue to be spent in all the big companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter) on how to monetize the information further, so much so that it has been the big buzz/hype for the last decade.

    Maybe one could name it ‘the rapture of the MBAs’ as they feverishly lust to micromanage maximizing profits: the “promise” of squeezing out that last fraction of a cent out of everything because now they can (potentially) get the information on what it will take all the way down to the individual purse level.

    Maybe big data and data-mining is just another huge bubble, that would be great as far as I am concerned (and I think the whole thing is partly ridiculous —but that's because I see “value” as something else— and partly incredibly dangerous —because I think it actually does contains a lot of information) but most of the companies, shareholders, and investors don't seem to think it's a bubble.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @10:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @10:29PM (#177291)

      All of those numbers are huge. A lot of companies etc. consider it normal to have both a Facebook page and a Twitter account (or several) and most use it for customer interaction and public relations/self-advertising. Twitter (or anything that replaces it but functions more or less the same way) isn't going away anytime soon.

      So now would be a good time to buy Twitter stock, right? Or should I wait for tomorrow for the price to really bottom out? :D

      • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday May 01 2015, @03:33AM

        by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 01 2015, @03:33AM (#177358) Journal

        Haha, or just don't ever :D

        I'm sure someone could make money from the stock if they worked hard, knew what they were doing, treated it as a form of commodity speculation, and then had a bit of luck as well, but I'm not that person XD

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