Slashdot Mirror
How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter's Value
An anonymous reader writes: Someone mistakenly published earnings information on a Nasdaq-run investor relations page for Twitter before the company officially released the news and it sent the stock into a tailspin. Initially the earnings statement went unnoticed, but soon a Tweet with the results got a lot of attention. The stock lost more than $8 billion at one point as news spread. "We asked the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading once we discovered our Q1 numbers were out, and we published our results as soon as possible thereafter," said Twitter's senior director for investor relations, Krista Bessinger. "Selerity, who provided the initial tweets with our results, informed us that earnings release was available on our Investor Relations site before the close of market. Nasdaq hosts and manages our IR website, and we explicitly instructed them not to release our results until after the market close and only upon our specific instructions, which is consistent with prior quarters. We are continuing to investigate with them exactly what occurred."
How is something as useless and stupid as Twitter be worth more than $8bn in the first place?
Value is entirely based on perception
... which is often biased and/or twisted
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The idea that releasing the Q1 earnings after-hours allows people to make better judgments - they don't think "shit I have to sell all my stock RIGHT NOW", because they have a bit to think about it before the morning. Otherwise, you get a runaway effect, with some people selling early, people noticing the stock price dropping, and it starts crashing as more and more people try to sell before it "craters."
In theory, more time to react will smooth out your responses and make things less scary.
It wasn't the tweet that caused the sell off, it was the poor Q1 numbers.
Well sort-of. The thing is wall street speculation is now highly automated. If a stock starts to slip before the numbers are supposed to be released, all the algorithms start to throw off warning bells and cause a sell-off run much more efficiently than humans reading twitter ever could.
If stock slips during an earnings announcement, it is expected, and bots don't emulate panic... if it happens BEFORE earnings announcements, bots latch on to the pattern in what is essentially insider trading, but with plausible deniability.
Another story covering the tweet suggests a slightly different story:
What Selerity does â" and they've done this before with Microsoft and ADP â" is monitor the web pages of public companies for changes that might be public, but not necessarily indexed.
This can be done using a simple web scraper â" an application that simply scans a site for pages, often systemically trying every likely URL for a live website.
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In the case of Twitter's earnings report, it appears that the third-party company (which according to Twitter is the Nasdaq-owned Shareholder.com) that handles Twitter's investor relations page published the page with its quarterly results, using a web address that you could intuit from its current URL scheme.
The URL scheme Twitter used was "https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=XXXXXX." The last published news release had the ID number of "905554."
Presumably, Selerity just had to continue to try iterations of that number sequence until it found the report. Twitter's Q1 2015 earnings had an ID number of "909177" â" meaning the Selerity web scraper would have had to try less than 4,000 numbers before hitting on the right one. Given today's processing power, that could happen in the blink of an eye.
This apparently was denied by Selerity but as many have pointed out, if it were true, is it that different from what troll weev was convicted and did jail time for?
Is guessing a URL really a "hack"?