Twitter shares soar after buyout story appears on bogus Bloomberg site Twitter's shares jumped four per cent this morning after a fake news story claimed the biz had received a $31bn buyout offer. The reason for the jump was that it appeared to come from respected newswire Bloomberg – but the piece was instead hosted at bloomberg.market, and not on the news organization's Bloomberg.com. "Twitter …
I can't help the feeling that it's Big Business that created the domain shambles, Big Business that gambles on share movements and Big Business that got caught by falling for a fake Big Business news item that pretended to be a Big Business news site, but with a different TLD.
So, deep down I just can't stop the feeling that It serves them bloody well right
Sorry.
Maybe ICANN registered it and ... no they wouldn't be that clever.
All these new TLD are stupid.
Can't we start a campaign for ISPs to block them from their DNS? Then for most internet users they wouldn't exist.
Probably too simplistic.
OK so you create a new website over a weekend, populate it with pages hacked from another site, and by tuesday enough people are reading that new site to affect share prices?
Sorry but I smell bollocks here. The timing is too fast. Its too quick for that number of people to have discovered the site. Google isn't going to give the site a high ranking. More likely there was share manipulation going on anyway and the website is simply there to confuse the trail.
Much trading is now done at very high speed, to capitalise on changes in the market. It's not about buying some shares and watching the company grow, it's about developing the most effective algorithms and getting information to feed into them the quickest.
It's a bit of an arms race and what you can see is when there is some spike, other algorithms will kick in to buy stock that is trending up quickly - the assumption (by the algorithm's creators) being that there is some good news in the market driving that.
So, not all the people forcing that price up necessarily had the news in question.
That said, there are services that will scour everything and publish it so some who did see this news didn't necessarily see it from the bloomberg.markets website. Traders also forward stories to each other so it all gets around.
AND, the point is that it really doesn't matter if the story was fake or not - to the big traders. What matters is that there were two changes in th share price, both of which could be capitalised on if one has the right algorithms and gets the information quickly enough - there are plenty of those who would have sold it higher than they bought it an earned a tidy gain.
Longer-term investors would have been unaffected as the price corrected so it's really only the high-speed traders who weren't quite speedy enough or whose algorithms were set differently who would have been negatively affected.
What's awesome is how big bad and scary they make the SEC (nah Madoff is legit) to be during required corporate training on avoiding insider training and stock scams but you then read the headlines and laugh. Then you take ethics training where they really warn you bribing foreign officials is a serious crime but then you realize you are never actually in contact with them as you are not that important and wonder if the executives in your former companies (not current at least) were also required to take the training. Funny how even post FIFA shitstorm Nike is still smelling like a rose. Don't misinterpret the rules or you might find yourself in the C Suite and rich.
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