United Airlines Shares Plummet 75% On Misinformation; Blame Game Begins
from the if-it's-on-the-internet-it-must-be-true dept
Shares of United Airlines' stock tumbled nearly 75% on Monday after an old 2002 report about a United Airlines bankruptcy filing was picked up and circulated as current. How did this happen? Apparently, a staffer at Income Securities Advisors Inc. did a search for "united bankruptcy 2008" on Google, and found an article on the Sun-Sentinel. Though the article was published in 2002, neither the Googlebot nor the Sun-Sentinel website indicated as much, and the news item was published to Income Securities' page on Bloomberg. Once the story hit the wire, shares plummeted from $12 to as low as $3, and 54 million shares traded hands before Nasdaq halted trading to investigate what was going on. After United issued an official "we're really not bankrupt" statement and the confusion started to lift, shares of United returned to a somewhat normal price.After all the dust has settled, the finger pointing has now begun. Who is to blame, if anyone? Sure, the Sun-Sentinel published the story on its site with an ambiguous date, but having archived articles on your site isn't a problem. However, they should really make the dates on their articles more obvious, since they apparently have pretty good SEO. As for Google, they are indeed guilty of publishing an inaccurate date, but as we've seen before, their usual recourse is to blame the site for the problem, and, that said, their terms of service clearly state that they are not liable for the accuracy of their data. As for Income Securities and Bloomberg, perhaps they will be more careful next time before they publish stories, or perhaps not. The thing is, mistakes happen (like Bloomberg publishing Steve Jobs' obituary last month) and rumors turn out to be false every day. Income Securities will "pay" for their mistake, since now they will need to earn back the trust of their clients.
For stock traders, timely information translates into moneymaking opportunities. A few decades ago, it would take a few days for the market to react to information (thereby creating a nice opportunity for the shrewd trader). Today, the speed with which information travels (and the market reacts) has increased considerably, as is clearly illustrated by this event. Sure, shares of United are still trading at approximately 10% less than its opening price on Monday, but perhaps that's more a reflection of the fact that a chapter 11 filing would not come as a surprise to anyone at this time. So, it appears that, in actuality, it's pointless to assign blame, since there doesn't seem to be a problem -- the system worked just as it should.
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Filed Under: bankruptcy, blame game, false report, google news, information, news, stock market
Companies: bloomberg, google, income securities, sun-sentinel, united airlines
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United Airlines
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Re: United Airlines
Want to know another way they cheat? They will claim to have the most on-time flights of any airline but what they fail to mention is that they don't count the flights they cancel, which then gets you booked onto another flight that they can THEN claim is on-time.
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http://www.eleete.com
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Better than Penny Stock Spam
We'll have to try this again tomorrow.
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Is the first line of this story irony?
In a bit of good news, the shares not only recovered to approx. $10, but any trades after a certain time may be annulled anyway.
The article itself had several clues in in (context) that made it very clear it was not 2008, but 2002. I'd say the fault lies with Bloomberg, who couldn't do basic checking before publishing a major story, about a major stock that would have a material affect on its price. I'm sorry, but putting the blame in any court save Bloomberg's is ridiculous.
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Re: Is the first line of this story irony?
Erm, you mean Income Securities - the Bloomberg reference was to a prior incident. But yeah, Income Securities are to blame for this - if they're publishing bad information based on a cursory, unverified Google search then they deserve whatever they get in terms of lost business.
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Re: Is the first line of this story irony?
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Re: Is the first line of this story irony?
Typo. Fixed. :) Thanks.
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Same rules of investing
No need for blame, the system worked.
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Well, duh
And why did the "researcher" type that query in the first place? Is their whole research protocol "type stuff into Google and see what you get"?
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Stock holders responsible
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Follow the $$$
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...............................
Apparently, a staffer at Income Securities Advisors Inc. did a search for "united bankruptcy 2008" on Google, and found an article on the Sun-Sentinel.
OK SO THIS INFORMATION CAME FROM THE SUN_SENTINEL WEB SITE.
As for Google, they are indeed guilty of publishing an inaccurate date, but as we've seen before, their usual recourse is to blame the site for the problem, and, that said, their terms of service clearly state that they are not liable for the accuracy of their data.
HOW IS INFORMATION FROM THE SUN-SENTINEL GOOGLE DATA?
WHAT MAKES IT GOOGLES RESPONSIBILITY TO CORRECT INFORMATION ON A NON GOOGLE WEB SITE?
IF YOU TRUST ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND BARONS, WELL YOU DESERVE A 75% LOSS.
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Re:
Google does differentiate between "news" and "the web" when performing searches. It also offers a service called "Google Alerts" where you can have alerts sent to you via email whenever a new link appears in a selected category (news or web). On Monday, people who had subscribed to Google news alerts about United Airlines received a "news" article saying that the company was filing for bankruptcy.
I agree that Google is not liable for the error, but it does open itself up for criticism for tagging web pages as "news" that are neither new nor newsworthy.
As for this comment "IF YOU TRUST ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND BARONS (sic), WELL YOU DESERVE A 75% LOSS," couldn't you have made the same statement about Bloomberg before Monday?
EG
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Why . . .
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How the UAL debacle all went down
I reconstruct the timeline here, with some thoughts about what the real lessons are:
http://www.readership.org/blog/2008/09/how-old-news-moved-market-united.html
Rich Gordon
Medill School, Northwestern University
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Every year in...
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Re: United Airlines
Thank for the author of this article.
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Re: United Airlines Shares Plummet 75%...
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