Below-Expected Earnings For Google Posted Early, Trading Halted 275
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from the BBC: "Trading in Google shares has been suspended after the internet giant released its third-quarter results early by mistake. Google blames financial printing firm RR Donnelley for filing an early draft of the results, which had been expected after the closing bell. Shares in Google were down 9% when trading in the stock was suspended. Shares had fallen as much as 10.5% at one stage. In a statement, Google said: 'Earlier this morning RR Donnelley, the financial printer, informed us that they had filed our draft 8K earnings statement without authorisation... We have ceased trading on Nasdaq while we work to finalise the document. Once it's finalised we will release our earnings, resume trading on Nasdaq and hold our earnings call as normal at 1:30 PST.'"
I just backed up the truck. (Score:2, Interesting)
News sources (Score:4, Interesting)
A pet peeve of mine (and one of my biggest gripes with Google News) is promoting news sources that are nationally or geographically far removed from the event in question. In this case, I noticed the British spelling of "finalise", which directed my attention to the fact that the linked article is from the BBC. So then I assumed this was in some way related to the London Stock Exchange, or it was the UK division of Google that prematurely released the figures. However that is not the case as this was indeed suspended on NASDAQ and involved the parent Google company.
Re:Why halt trading? (Score:5, Interesting)
They have to halt trading to prevent automated trading programs from selling it down to zero.
Once there's a fast enough and large enough movement, you start getting more selling from automatic stop-loss orders, automatic short selling, and all kinds of nasty things.
The idea of a trading halt is to prevent computer programs from destroying the economy in milliseconds. Garbage in, garbage out, you know.
Re:im no trader but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why a useful strategy with fundamentally sound stocks is to play the counter-cyclical game: When the market is going "SELLSELLSELLOHGODSELLIT", that's your signal to start looking for a price that you will buy at. When the market is saying "This is the best company to ever exist!", start selling.
Of course, the risk in this strategy is that the reason the market is going SELLSELLSELL is because the stock is no longer sound. But that's unlikely if it's a company that actually makes something.
Re:Bigger not better (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Strange Anniversary or Black Monday (Score:5, Interesting)
Strange story, that. I've been investing since I was a teen, and did paper trading in grade school from stock tables.
On Black Monday, after having just written an Economics paper for Capilano University on ethical investing, for which I'd researched true and tax book value for corporations, I realized that Apple was selling at such a low rate you couldn't lose if you bought it.
I phoned my grandmother and told her not to panic, and to put $10,000 in Apple stock. She did. Later she gifted part of it to me. I later sold parts of that and bought and sold Microsoft stock from the proceeds, which became the 20 percent downpayment on my first house.
Best stock day ever.
This led me to a later decision to buy 600 shares of Ford on what turned out to be the absolute bottom of the market. Made a killing on that.
From risk, comes opportunity.
Re:Bigger not better (Score:1, Interesting)
Serious questions from someone who just returned a Nexus 7 due to it not meeting my expectations. I have not owned but used several iPads and do own an iPhone.
Do you not notice the lag in the display and the awkwardness of the on screen keyboard? I bought the Nexus7 because I read about Project Butter (making the UI buttery smooth) and thought that since it was a high priority for 4.x they would have worked it out but it is still horribly laggy and often made me wonder if I had clicked a link in chrome or if I had missed the link because nothing would happen for a moment. I also found the blue glow at the end of the scroll area to be practically unnoticable and not enough of an indication for me to realize that I was at the end. Many times I thought it was just lagging again. This bit is probably due to being used to the iOS way of doing things, but it seemed far too little to be an effective indicator for the end of a scrollable area.
I know I sound like an Apple fanboy :( but do you really think it is THAT GREAT or are you just a Android fan? It seems to me that even with the 4.1.2 update it was considerably less smooth than what I'm used to in iOS to the point of being obnoxious. You don't notice?
I'm honestly asking as I'm trying to determine if my expectations are just unacceptably high, I have a hard time thinking they are since at least iOS devices meet my expectations. I'm of the opinion that 4.x Android devices with suffcient processing power would blow the pants off Windows CE/WindowsMobile before iOS, but since the release of iOS they just seem like another ME TOO that isn't as good as the real thing.
I accept due to Androids nature that there will be plenty of 'ME TOO' devices, but I really expected something with the Nexus brand to be top of the line and it just isn't too me.
Re:Dumping?! (Score:4, Interesting)
The difference here could be that RIMs products have always been shitty. They were first out the gates for mobile email, but their software has always been poorly designed (IMO), and they've barely improved their products let alone done anything innovative. Everyone else has overtaken them now.
Google on the other hand tend to create things that work well, and are still improving and innovating. If any tech giants are set to go downhill over the next few years, it's RIM, MS and Apple (the iPhone 5 reception was hardly stellar.. Apple are losing their cool factor without Jobs' guidance). Google should at least keep going steadily. Not that I even invest in the stock market anyway so I don't care that much :p
Re:Dumping?! (Score:0, Interesting)
Google on the other hand tend to create things that work well, and are still improving and innovating.
Yeah things that work so well which is why they've canceled dozens of projects and products in just the last few years because they were crappy and no one wanted to use them.
(the iPhone 5 reception was hardly stellar..
Who cares what the "reception" was when it broke sales records? They sold 5 million in just the first weekend.