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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @04:44PM
Theoretically it's expected future dividends that's supposed to ultimately determine the stock price. What's the point of stock traders as a whole holding stocks if they don't get anything out of it. Realistically it doesn't really work that way.
(Score: 2) by SecurityGuy on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:58PM
That's exactly right. It doesn't work that way in practice because we don't know today what those future dividends or other cash flows will be. If we did, and could correctly know our expected rate of return in putting that money somewhere else, we could precisely price stocks.