
How one tweet wiped $8bn off Twitter's value - SimplyUseless
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32511932
======
4k
BBC is linkbaiting now?

One tweet didn't wipe $8bn off its value, the results did. If the results were
released next day, it still would have lost value ffs. I feel angry reading
through this and realizing it was a waste of time fluff.

Say what you will, its evident that HN crowd loves sensationalism more than
content, as seen again and again.

~~~
jscheel
It's definitely sensationalist, but the fact remains, that single tweet
represented prior knowledge causing a large, unexpected shift near the end of
the trading day. Being unexpected, it seems to have triggered a fear-based
selloff that may not have been as bad as if if the stock moved either
direction after the earnings report.

~~~
muzz
But the market cap is down another ~$1.3B this morning, as investors have had
overnight to digest the news and price it in

~~~
Alupis
It blows my mind that Twitter, a simple messaging service, still has a market
cap of $26.31B after all this...

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salmonellaeater
The salient information:

 _Well, it seems that Nasdaq slipped up here after Twitter furnished the
exchange with earnings details ahead of time ready for official publication._

...

 _Selerity then made sure that everyone knew about it through Twitter 's own
platform, but it did not break any rules in doing so as the results had
already been published and were effectively in the public arena._

 _" We inadvertently released an early version of their [Twitter's] earnings,"
Nasdaq said._

~~~
dvdcxn
Does this open up NASDAQ to a potential lawsuit?

~~~
Alupis
The article didn't make the link between NASDAQ, NYSE, and Twitter clear.

The quarterly report was posted on twitter's own website
(investor.twitterinc.com). Twitter would have had to prepare the report, and
post it there. Twitter is listed on the NYSE, not NASDAQ...

Seems Twitter goofed more than anything...

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> The article didn't make the link between NASDAQ, NYSE, and Twitter clear.

No, it did (well as far as NASDAQ and Twitter are concerned). Twitter was
quoted as saying the following in the article: "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."

So it sounds like NASDAQ released this early on one of Twitter's websites.

~~~
Alupis
Ah, I see that now.

In that case, I'm sure NASDAQ's contract with Twitter indemnifies them from
anything like this.

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pibefision
Everyone critizes how Buzzfeed defines article's titles and here it is: BBC
using the same tricks to get some extra trafic

~~~
carlio
The BBC has been going in this direction for a while. Note how most of the
articles feature single-sentence paragraphs - turns out that's the easiest way
to get people to stay involved. A lot of articles feature 6-7 images now too.
The football(soccer) 'opinion pieces' are always about the top clubs and
especially Man Utd, because that will get the most shares and readers. They're
becoming as guilty as everyone else.

~~~
meigwilym
To be fair, short paragraphs has been the BBC's style of online news for
years. This story from 2005, for example:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm)

Edit: clarity

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binxbolling
If Twitter knew this rough patch was coming (albeit not so soon), why did they
remove the Discover and Activity tabs from their mobile app? Just anecdotally,
I, and everyone I know, spent more time on Twitter because of those two
features. Isn't driving more engagement and longer time-in-app tied to
revenues? Financial considerations aside, why remove those?

~~~
cma
Or how about changes to the desktop site, where now clicking an image in a
tweet actually makes it smaller most of the time. Gotta be one of the worst
designs I've ever seen.

~~~
pjc50
Twitter images are _totally_ broken, especially when people want to use them
to convey text. There really needs to be a "view original size" that doesn't
involve me using the DOM inspector.

------
venomsnake
If a single tweet wipes $8 bn of your value - you are overvalued. Probably by
an order of magnitude ...

~~~
ifdefdebug
I just don't understand that market. From the article: "(...) Twitter missing
market analysts' revenue expectations of $456m by $20m (...)" \- so one hour
before, everybody was expecting $456m and held the stocks, now it's officially
$430m and they get wiped like that? For less than 5%?

~~~
reinhardt
I really don't grok stockmarket even though I participate in it (mostly
passively). As an almost outsider, it looks like a self-referential make-
believe game. You are rewarded (or punished) for predicting not some objective
aspect of reality but for _what most others_ (aka "the market")
believe/think/feel about the reality. It's very bizarre.

~~~
lmm
You can always buy and hold and get your dividends; there are plenty of
"boring" companies where the valuation is much less speculative. The
newsworthy companies like Twitter are the ones where it's much more uncertain;
no-one knows what kind of dividends Twitter is likely to pay in the future.
But that's not the majority of the market.

------
DangerousPie
If Selerity was clever enough to short the stock before publishing this they
probably made a nice chunk of change yesterday...

~~~
shawabawa3
Wouldn't that be extremely obvious insider trading? (which is illegal, right?)

~~~
dkrich
No, it's not insider trading if the information is publicly-available, which
it was at the time.

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wdr1
Mistakes like this are unfortunate, but once made, it's shocking that the SEC
allows them to them to take the content down.

The wishful thinking that it "undoes" the error is understandable, but in
reality that's not possible, and it really does is restrict access, give
unfair access to information and effectively enables select parties to trade
on insider information.

------
heimatau
So, I was following this accidental leak on reddit, someone made a really good
comment. It goes as follows, regardless of the loss of market cap. _Who_
would've thought that Twitter would be a viable two billion dollar company?
Wow. They've achieved a lot. Props to them, even though they have a volatile
stock.

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bhartzer
$8b was wiped off of the value, but personally I think Twitter was over-valued
in the first place. So maybe this brings it more into line with what it's
really worth.

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perlgeek
Clickbait title. Afaict it was the bad revenue numbers that made the stock
fall, not the tweet that carried the news.

~~~
throwaway029
You're saying if Twitter/Nasdaq had released their earnings as originally
planned after closing that they still would have lost $8Bn after opening?

~~~
dvdcxn
Perhaps not that much, but if the earnings were bad enough to justify such a
response, a night to sleep on it may not have made much of a difference.

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myth_buster
So what was the technical reason for the gaffe? Was it just someone simply
messing up effective from timestamp?

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untilHellbanned
Not too familiar, is there any way NASDAQ could take a hit for this?

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btbuildem
Good publicity for Selerity, anyways..

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laurentsabbah
Shocked this headline isn't a sponsored post on my FB newsfeed with an image
of the world ending and link to somebogusnewssite dot com

