News travels fast, especially when its about a multibillion dollar company trading on Nasdaq. Twitter’s shares have just got hit by a Black Swan caused by the exchange service Shareholder.com.
Late Tuesday marked a stressful event for Twitter traders as they saw shares of the company hitting the circuit breakers in seconds and after the resumption of trading, tanking as low as 26% before closing down a bit over 18% on the day.
The company’s market cap has been swiftly cut by more than $6.1 billion at one point due to the accidental earnings release. Ironically, after the messaging platform used by Nasdaq sent the embargoed information out, the news was picked up by independent data Analytics firm Selerity which tweeted the numbers using a ‘breaking’ hashtag.
After the circuit breakers have kicked in when the stock was 6% lower, after trading resumed shares plunged wiping out long positions from the market.
The event marks yet another occurrence of technological malfunction promoting a big swing in the capital markets. Back in October the same service has mistakenly released the earnings report of JPMorgan some hours early.
Nasdaq’s news delivering service is likely to come under increased scrutiny for botching an earnings release for the second time in the past seven months.
Twitter’s earnings figures were scheduled for release after the market close on Tuesday. Typically publicly traded companies avoid making earnings announcements during market hours in order to give investors time to digest the figures instead of reacting chaotically, just like it happened yesterday.
