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%?
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.
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.
How many people would divest themselves of Goldman Sachs stock if a reputable source tweeted something like "Sachs CEO arrested for fraud, ponzi-scheme charges."
For Sachs, $8 bn represents about 10% of their market cap. You don't think their stock would dip 10%?
