Normally I wouldn't carry stock market news, because I don't care about stock markets, but this item is worthy of note. It's common practice to post earnings results online ahead of time and then to announce the URL to make it public, which is what Twitter did. But a web-scraping tool called Selerity found the unannounced website, discovered Twitter's lower-than-expected earnings, and, for good measure, posted the information in a tweet. Shares immediately dropped 6% before trading was stopped, then another 18% to close the day down some $8 billion worth. So here's my question: if stock markets are such reliable measures of value, why does one tweet drop the stock 25%? The answer (in my view) is that stock market values aren't rational; they are speculative and based more on hope (and willingness to pay) rather than actual data.
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