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At least the very short-term trades are executed by algorithms and they are susceptible to making mistakes. What the article fails to mention is that the rise w
by this_user 11y ago
At least the very short-term trades are executed by algorithms and they are susceptible to making mistakes. What the article fails to mention is that the rise was quickly reversed once enough people actually read and analysed the news and started shorting the stocks. Right now it is essentially trading where it was before the news hit.
- celticninja 11y agoThe article says it is trading 3% higher overall. That's not an insignificant gain off the back of fake news.
- Cshelton 11y agoIt was trading around that level before the fraudulent article.
- this_user 11y agoThe stock opened virtually unchanged but started trading higher right after the open and had already gained around $1.1 by the time the news hit. When that happened, it spiked a good two additional Dollar, but lost around $1.9 of that over the course of the next minutes. Interestingly, someone bought 1700 calls 3 minutes before the event.
- celticninja 11y agoCan you ELI5 'bought 1700 calls'?
- Cshelton 11y agoCalls are a type of option. Basically you buy the "option" to purchase a stock at a certain price. Say a stock is at $10. You buy an option, which is a contract, that allows you to purchase that stock for $15 anytime within the next 3 months(which is when the option contract expires). Now one month later the stock is at $20 per share. Your option you bought that allows you to purchase the stock for $15 (which is called the strike price) is still good of course. You may now go purchase 100 shares (a standard size for 1 option contract) at $15 a share and immediately sell all of those shares for $20 a share. Instantly making $500 net. In practice, most option contracts hit their expiration and are worthless. They are "out of the money" options. Basically if that stock went down to $8 per share, you would not "exercise" your option to buy it at $15, because that would be more expensive than market price...and you would let it just expire. There are a ton of strategies with options, from highly leverage speculative investing to using them as tools to hedge positions. So if somebody bought 1700 call options right before, at which time they were "out of the money", and then sold them at the peak twitter high price of today...they would have made around $255,000 if they choose to exercise the options. But that's assuming they bought at a strike price that was the same as the market price at the given time...around $37/share. All that money for a relatively low upfront investment risk. The 1700 calls could be related, or could have been stupid luck. Call options are fairly common and that person did it at the right time. The real question is, did they exercise the options or sell off the option contracts (which is what is done most of the time) and actually make all that money. If so, there might have been a little more going on than dumb luck (fraud).