“Rumors have been circulating that Steve Jobs is back in the hospital,” Stock Tik Tok reports. “This has caused a huge drop in AAPL, as well as incredible activity today. We have put several phone calls into sources, and we cannot verify this. In fact, it looks to be one huge drop the stock ploy [sic]. We are trying to find out, where this rumor first hit. Twitter, it looks like. As far as we know, it is incredibly false, but we are sure somebody made money off of this.”
“Update: Steve Jobs is absolutely fine. Just as we thought,” Stock Tik Tok reports without attributing the source of their information.
Full article here.
[Attribution: SF Gate, 9 to 5. MacThanks to MacDailyNews reader “Lynn W.” for the heads up.]
Time for a witch hunt!
Wow. Y’know, I have a Twitter account. I’m sure I could find a broker who would let me short a few shares. I’m sure most of us have the same resources. In other words, our stock market is complete f***ing broken.
If a goddamn tweet is enough to drop the stock to where it makes money for the shorts, then isn’t it time the SEC stepped and did something about this?
And my parents wonder why I don’t invest.
——RM
This sort of pattern is very suspicious and the SEC is certainly looking at anyone who shorted much of the stock today or recent days. If they can connect any of them to the tweet, they will be prosecuted.
Unfortunately, if they catch someone, it would likely be an amateur. The really clever monkeys at the hedge funds have ways of covering their tracks.
Seems like somebody needs to get sued. Surely, thanks to twitter, all texts are time/date stamped. Grab the IP address and see if it relates it to anyone who made a substantial amount of money on Apple today.
Speaking of twitter. I’ve recently found twitter to be a great source of news. Most of the sites I follow make a twitter post when a new article is available. I wish MDN had a twitter feed.
I also like your blog, Take To Task. I can’t find a link to a twitter feed on your blog though. If you have one, let me know.
Okay, I found the Twitter feed for MDN, it’s just @MacDailyNews. Non-intuitive, I know.
MDN – Why don’t you publish this on your site more?
@Take To Task – I can’t find a twitter feed for you. Do you have one?
LordRobin, that’s exactly what I’m thinking too. The market is completely jacked and people are totally gaming the system.
@LordRobin,
Spreading false rumors in order to short a stock IS illegal and the feds DO frequently investigate and, when appropriate, prosecute offenders. As far as this being a reason not to invest, that only applies to very short term/day trading types of investments. These manipulations don’t impact longer-term investments, which are still a VERY good idea, especially in an excellent company like Apple.
Cheers.
In related news Steve Ballmer was hospitalized and Microsoft stock saw a large spike.
Nice one! : )
It was a mixed day on Wall St., but I think the bigger impact on AAPL was the reporting of small lines and light traffic for the Verizon iPhone, especially coming after a nice run up on the stock over the past few days.
Yeah. I bet AAPL would have been up another percentage point today if there were lines for the ViPhone.
Apple got some bad press today. “Verizon iPhone Lines Are Laughably Short” and “Apple’s iAds are hitting a rough spot”.
Definitely *not* the kind of headlines you want to see when investors are hoping for people to line up for the ViPhone. Overall, AAPL only dropped 1% today. That’s not bad considering the mini “flash crash” today. As a long term AAPL investor I’m not worried at all. 😀
Always glad to hear Steve is OK.
The short Verizon lines is just rubbish. I passed 3 Verizon shops this morning in NYC on my way to work just before 7 am and there was a substantial line outside of every one of them.
The news people are confused because Verizon has so many outlets. I am sure the earth shattering count will blow away AT&T numbers when published early next week.
This tells me that there are those who are manipulating the market for their own gains and then there are Apple competition who love to spread false rumors to slow their own inevitable failure.
I wish Steve all the best and thank him for a great team that he has managed to create to support the Apple fans worldwide.
In a just society, stunts like this would be land the pepetrator in prison.
90% of the world is controlled by 10% of the people ….
In this case it seems under 1% of the people controlled 99% of the stock price today … and they did it illegally – bums / scum bags ….
As a long-term investor does not really matter – Apple will roar back on fundamentals ….
What makes it so bad is that there are too many worms that dump Apple shares upon hearing any somewhat negative Steve Jobs health rumor. You’d figure it just wouldn’t happen over and over, but it does. These manipulators of Apple stock will never be caught. It’s just unfortunate that Apple has to be the manipulator’s patsy out of all the stocks in the world. The market is completely broken if these kind of things are allowed to happen time and time again. I wonder if these rumors are just childish maliciousness or a well-designed plan by some hedge funds.
As for short Verizon iPhone lines, it’s a non-issue. iPhone buyers will come. There’s no way both Apple and Verizon misjudged iPhone demand on the carrier. It was either the cold weather or most consumers figuring there’s no immediate rush to get an iPhone. Give it a few days and iPhone sales will be brisk. How no lines translates to no demand is rather beyond my understanding. I don’t think immediate demand would be as high as when the iPhone 4 was first introduced, but the demand is definitely there.
Pretty stupid, we just got an update yesterday that he was doing great, and at Apple Campus
God, people can be disgusting. Someone apparently started this rumor
to drop the stock.
Lines or not, once the confirmed number of iPhones sold by Verizon is released, the stock will probably go up a bit.
In the long term, Apple stock looks great, regardless.
Bullshit.