Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.'s accidental early release of Twitter Inc.'s earnings gives the stock exchange operator a black eye as it continues efforts to diversify and faces increasing competition in its core business as a trading venue.
Nasdaq unit Shareholder.com posted the release on the Twitter website for 45 seconds Tuesday about an hour before it was scheduled to go public. The early dissemination of the report, which showed revenue and outlook falling short of analysts' forecasts, sent Twitter's stock plunging and led to a trading halt. The company's quarterly results were then officially published during the day's trading session. Twitter's shares closed down more than 18 percent.
"The posting was caused by an operational issue that exposed the release on Twitter's IR website for approximately 45 seconds," Nasdaq spokesman Joseph Christinat said in a telephone interview. "During those seconds the site was scraped by a third party that publicly disseminated the earnings information."
The results were first reported by Selerity Inc., a New York-based provider of financial news and information.
In October, Shareholder.com prematurely released JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s third-quarter earnings. Investors also still remember the delayed opening of Facebook Inc.'s debut in 2012, and an incident in August 2013 when trading in all of Nasdaq's listed companies was stopped for more than three hours after a malfunction of its Securities Information Processor, said Larry Tabb, chief executive officer of research firm Tabb Group LLC.
"This pre-release of Twitter's earnings was not good for the brand," Tabb said. "They are an exchange, and they're held to a higher level of scrutiny, and so it's critical for them to get this right."
Business on 04/30/2015