Sodastream (SODA) Twitter Misinformation
If you look at today’s SODA chart you can see a little after 2PM there was a big dive in the stock and a big increase in trading volume. After an initial bounce, the stock proceeded to sell-off the rest of the day.
Reuters reported around 2:08PM that Coca-Cola said their Freestyle Fountain Machine should be in 80 markets by year-end.
As you can see, this led many people on Twitter to imply Coca-Cola was now “competing” with Sodastream. The action on the stream even got @StockTwits to tweet about SODA’s move to all 125,000+ followers on StockTwits. Even @Benzinga, a leading financial news site with 11,800+ followers, tweeted about the SODA move.
The only problem is if anyone did any basic research at all you would have found the following:
1) The Coca-Cola Freestyle Fountain machine is not new. It’s been around since 2009. Link
2) The Freestyle machine is huge and is primarily marketed to restaurants. Link
3) The Freestyle machine costs 30% more than a regular soda fountain and leases out for $320/month. Link
4) And it costs $18,000. Link
So does a product that was introduced in 2009 primarily for restaurants like Subway with ingredients that cost 30% more, and costs $18,000 per machine compete with a $100 Sodastream product sold to consumers at home? Really?
It’s clear the Coca-cola is “now competing with Sodastream” innuendo all over Twitter and the trading news sites today is complete and utter bunk.
Even CNBC’s Herb Greenberg, a noted skeptic of Sodastream in the past, agreed that SODA traded on a “false rumor” today.
I love Twitter. I love StockTwits, but let’s try to do a little bit of leg-work and research before we tweet and re-tweet information. That’s all I ask.
Disclosure: At time of writing, the author is long Sodastream stock which he scaled in on today’s misinformation driven afternoon dip.
Great summary. Now all the idiots that fell for this should link this article on their websites and twitter feeds.
how come the price hasn’t recovered, when it had 2 hours before the close ?
Stocks have moved on rumors and innuendo since the beginning of the stock market. Many of them weren’t true. Even CNBC, that bastion of market “truth” has been known, (can’t tell you how many times I and my associates were “Gasparinoed” in late 2008) to move the market on shaky information.
-DT