Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

I love these 'rumors' and using terms like 'walked away' juxtaposed against one another.

Wouldn't it be beneficial to start all sorts of rumors about big players wanting to buy Twitter and then when every single one of them says they're in fact not interested, the value plunges and the actual interested buyer can pick them up on the cheap? Is this legal, provided no insider info was used? Doesn't this happen all the time?

View on HN

Probably, under SEC Section 9, but its hard to prove. You'd have to show that specific people started the rumors, rather than merely repeated them, and a chain from them to those that profited.

Yeah, what you describe is illegal - it's market manipulation.

Being illegal and getting caught are two very different things.

its illegal if you short said stock prior to starting the rumors, and then profitting from the outcome. "pump and dump".

Technically, a "pump and dump" is the opposite of what's being described here. This would be a "poop and scoop".

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/poopandscoop.asp

thats awesome. I didn't know there was a name.

This is rumored to be what is going on.

Fake acquisitions created for the purpose of driving up share price, during a time period when twitter employees are allowed to sell.

Got to allow twitter employees to cash out somehow.

This all happened during a time when employees were _not_ allowed to sell stock.

Is there a rolling window?

Yes, there was a stock sales window when I worked there and I assume there still is now.

Most publicly traded companies have lockout periods if you have access to "insider information." Given that Twitter is (was) fairly transparent about company financials, this is probably still true.

Twitter employees can't currently sell stock? I was unaware of this.

They can only trade one month out of three. Specifically, they can trade immediately after quarterly earnings.

This is pretty common amongst similar companies.

This. I have no doubt one of the aforementioned suitors, or some other, will conveniently step forward and strike a deal with Twitter in the $20-30 per share range.

I think you're right, but $20 - $30 is waaay too big an estimate here. I think its more like $20-24.

...maybe a foreign company at this point...

How do you justify that price, though? It involves a whole lot of growth that isn't really there. Google and FB are probably the only companies that could turn Twitter profitable, but probably only at a point that justifies a sale price of around $15.

A lot of people think that twitter could relatively easily be made profitable by significantly cutting engineering staff.

http://brontecapital.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/some-comment-on-...

Yea, people miss the fail whale.

Pretty sure that Google or Facebook could handle the scale Twitter operates at without the same headcount.

If I had google behind me, I could also leverage ridiculous technology. Both are larger than I am (and twitter is), so this is not surprising.

The vast majority of current twitter engineers have nothing to do with keeping fail whales at bay.

Isn't that the whole point of hiring engineers? To keep your service running? It's not going to maintain itself.

Isn't that the whole point of hiring engineers?

No. If all twitter cared about was keeping the existing service running they could do it with 1/10th the current technical staff.

I will bet you $500 that this doesn't happen within the next 90 days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com