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Eli Lilly stock fell by $20B because of a fake tweet about free insulin
- cable2600 4y agoIt shows you the power of Twitter and rumors and fake news.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoNah. I see it different. It shows you how stupid and greedy people and algorithms can be. They take unvetted input and blindly run with it? Really? That existed long before Twitter. It's not Twitter's fault that stupid scales so easily. When will The Media and Wall Street - and political leaders? - learn that Twitter is a source of info *that must be vetted*. Ignoring that fact, and letting your internal biases get the best of you is simply not an option *anywhere on the internet*.
- thedailymail 4y agoThe commenter didn't say it was Twitter's fault, just that this shows its power. That power could be attributable, in part at least, to people's gullibility, mobthink, etc. (Personally I think there is some responsibility on Twitter's part as well - after all, they suddenly made it possible to buy unvetted Blue Checks, when until recently that mark was a sign of confirmed identity.)
- chiefalchemist 4y agoThe power isn't Twitter's. It's, ironically, small minded humans. They just happen to be fond of collecting on Twitter. Twitter is correlation, not causation.
- tonetheman 4y agoYou are so wrong. The ONLY way to authenticate someone on twitter has been those check marks. And this week that all went to hell. It is the same thing on tiktok they have verified accounts and I know that someone at tiktok verified this is X. Up until this week those blue checks meant something and people who are not in the new cycle would not have known. I/We are in the news cycle because we are nerds/techies. The whole market may have been heading down but this contributed.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoPro tip: If you want to have a constructive adult discussion, don't lede with "You're wrong." And for the record, you don't just vet source, you vet the information itself. If it can't be confirmed and you act anyway...well that is by defintion child's play. If children - *in adult bodies* - want to play in traffic on Twitter, it's not Tw's job to police them, or change their diapers when they shat their pants. Who's wrong now??
- tonetheman 4y agoYup yup. I should not have lead with you are wrong. But the blue check mark is really how most people (myself included) decide if a source is real on twitter. And that was destroyed this week by someone who apparently does not actually understand how twitter works. So assuming a lot of people also trust that check mark and now what should be a good reliable source of information gave out something that is false. It was clearly part of it. Was that the only reason the stock dropped? Probably not. The stock market is effectively random and only barely involved in reality.
- GistNoesis 4y agoSome unverified twitter user thinks its more about reacting to some bloomberg news https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426?cxt=HHwWhMDSoZOD85QsAAAA https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426?cxt... about the market of some of their drugs shrinking. I'll let the algos sort the mess of correlation or causation, truths and untruths, and just buy if they told me to.
- seydor 4y agoSoon we will hear about this as an example of fake news. I think it shows the power of a baseless rumour when it tells people what they want to hear
- KronisLV 4y agoAs someone from Europe, this is hard to fathom: > Eli Lilly’s insulin products sold $878 million in one quarter alone recently. Again lilly’s main insulin is at 43-60x price markup! It’s almost all profit! > Lilly, Novo & Sanofi together supply 100% of all insulin in the US, and 90% of entire world! All the other details aside, this doesn't feel okay and I cannot believe that elected officials voted against legislation to prevent this sort of a markup situation. Whatever happened to them needing to represent the interests of the people?
- PubliusMI 4y ago
- kennend3 4y ago> Whatever happened to them needing to represent the interests of the people? As a Canadian, where Americans often come here in droves to buy cheap insulin i've often wondered the same thing. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/caravan-of-americans-cross-into-canada-just-to-get-affordable-insulin-1.4415683 https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/caravan-of-americans-cross-int... Americans drive 1,000 KM just to get affordable insulin which in many cases is a life or death drug?
- rufus_foreman 4y agoHuman insulin is available without a prescription for around $25 a vial at Walmart. That is what most diabetics would have used 20 years ago before the drug companies developed analog insulin versions that are easier to use. Analog insulin is available with a prescription for around $75 a vial at Walmart. About 1 in 7 Walmart shoppers have diabetes.
- swores 4y agoThat's still ridiculously expensive, no? edit: yes, seems it is indeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33572721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33572721
- lizardactivist 4y agoGood! It should be a crime to sell life-saving insulin at a 50x markup.
- leereeves 4y agoThis is not true. The entire healthcare sector fell on Friday, and some companies, like Cigna, fell more than Eli Lilly.
- sekai 4y agoThis is nonsense, overall healthcare (including Eli Lilly) stock selloffs started before the tweet.
- cypress66 4y agoPeople and the media love these stories of "X company stock fell by Y because of Z". Most of the time it is either extremely exaggerated or outright false.
- kennend3 4y agoThis! The "taking heads" always want to find some sort of causation/correlation and often it is just absolute garbage. One day they may make a statement like : "Stocks tumble on Ukraine updates" The very next day : "Stocks rally on Ukraine updates". They just look for any "news" to try to show they understand the interconnected nature of news and markets. Often they are just grasping at straws. Here's the thing.. If they could actually do what they say they are doing, hedge funds would be snapping them up and paying them far more.
- ganeshkrishnan 4y agoOne of my quote(which I developed after trading options for a year) I like to reuse is: News doesn't move the stocks. Stocks moves the news. When CPI went sky high few months back and the stock market still rallied the news was "S&P rallies while investors digest CPI information". Like, what is this even supposed to mean?
- zone411 4y agoNot to mention that this tweet was posted on Thursday and the stock didn't bounce back quickly as it would once it was obvious it was a fake (and that would be almost instantly). Just a bunch of people with a confirmation bias who want to believe on Twitter, Reddit, and HN with little trading knowledge upvoting this stuff.
- refurb 4y agoBut it gets clicks! And that's what important to the media.
- dmitriid 4y ago"The insulin stock price story should be: “insulin should be free”, not how much valuation was reduced. You know that, right?" https://twitter.com/janl/status/1591394005593497601 https://twitter.com/janl/status/1591394005593497601
- kklisura 4y ago> Eli Lilly is down 5% because the market for their most profitable drug, a $125k/yr mAb IL-17 inhibitor, fell 5%. This is why Novartis, their major competitor with Cosentyx, is also down the same amount Not everything is about Twitter! [1] > Notably, as well, Eli Lilly was ordered to pay $176.5 millipn to Teva in U.S. migraine drug patent trial on November 9th. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426 https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426 [2] https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1591154145977053184 https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/159115414597705318...
- refurb 4y agoSomeone else posted this. Not surprised at all. People think some portfolio manager see an obviously fake tweet and immediately unloads their position?
- ethanbond 4y agoWhich of these statements do you think is false? 1) People make trades based on information, at least sometimes 2) People are tricked by false information, at least sometimes
- xg15 4y agoI mean... I don't want to speculate about that particular incident, but generally, increasing parts of portfolio management seem to be done by algorithms. It seems plausible to me that the "verified" badge on twitter could be coded as some sort of trust anchor in some of those. Something like "scan all tweets of the last day for names of our stocks + some keywords, but restrict the search to verified accounts only". That kind of signal would be strongly affected by the current chaos.
- Barrin92 4y agoI still remember about ten years ago when Twitter went public an entirely unrelated company named Tweeter went up 2000% because it traded under "TWTRQ". So yep I wouldn't put it past a few geniuses to sell based on a fake tweet.
- steanne 4y agodicsussed more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568165
- seydor 4y agoAre trading bots still using the blue check as a signal? Hope nobody knows that
- pacifika 4y agoI don’t think we can accept tweets now as a source of truth or hacker news submissions really. A personal blog post at least has a persons credibility behind it.
- simulosius 4y agoHonestly, could you ever accent a tweet as a source of truth?!
- watwut 4y agoBefore, you would not had blue tick on something that looks like major brand, known person etc. So yes, quite often you could know "this was said by this person". The trolling (both for fun and for harm) on platform went off the charts last two weeks and there are multiple blue checkmarks accounts for a lot of companies/individuals.
- d23 4y agoSure, to the extent you could trust any other piece of writing. Tweets come with the same caveats as any other source of information and require critical thinking to process.
- uwagar 4y agohaha good riddance greedy speculators.
- mimimi31 4y agoDoes something like that actually affect a company other than in the very short term? Won't the stock value just go back to where it was before, because nothing about the company and how it should be valued has actually changed?
- dopidopHN 4y agoThat would imply that stock prices reflect some type of real life properties of the company itself.
- wodenokoto 4y agoI don’t understand what the checkmark on Twitter does. I thought it was “identity confirmed” and when Elon started charging for it, it would basically allow anyone to confirm they are who they say they are. Except it allows anybody to say they are anybody and Twitter will go “yep, we can confirm it’s true!” Like, why the hell does getting the checkmark not update your name to match the credit card used for payment?
- omega3 4y agoI'm guessing it's an equivalent to an expensive watch, fashion label handbag, reddit gold, video game skin.
- bitshiftfaced 4y agoI wonder if the issue is not with personal identities, but with whether you represent a company brand or group.
- StayTrue 4y agoThe meaning changed but the UI did not. Almost as if Elon did not understand the existing meaning before reinventing the blue check. His own Chesterton’s fence.