A Bot Found Twitter’s Financial Results Early and Caused Its Stock to Plunge

Apparently, releasing a company’s financial results ahead of time can cause quite a dramatic effect on its stock value. A financial tech named Selerity managed to dig up Twitters’ numbers using a bot that scans for financial results-related URLs. Selerity published the company’s quarterly results before they were released officially on Tuesday, and this caused a stock price tumble of 18 percent. As a result, Twitter’s stock price was at $42.27 per share at the end of the day.

Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.

— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

During the year’s first quarter, the social networking goliath lost over $162 million. Furthermore, from 2010 to 2014, it lost over $1.5 billion, which is quite considerable even for such a successful brand. During an annual report that was released in 2015, Twitter’s management stated the following:

” Since our inception, we have incurred significant operating losses, and, as of December 31, 2014, we had an accumulated deficit of $1.57 billion”

CEO Dick Costolo tried to reassure investors by releasing the following statement:

“It is still early days for these products, and we have a strong pipeline that we believe will drive increased value for direct response advertisers in the future.”

Do you think that Twitter will be able to recover from these significant losses?

Thank you Arstechnica for providing us with this information.