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Comment by automatom | Hacker News Reader

Even if it is, he's right. Although this is anecdotal, I have a friend who works in finance that said the drop in stock was coincidental to the stock price dropping. Apparently pharmaceuticals are a defensive sector in a bear market, and the market popping up last week meant the price of Eli Lilly dropped, as I understand it. In his words that tweet causing the stock to drop was "fake news"

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There is never going to be a way to conclusively ascribe the drop in stock price to any one event. However, the act of pointing out the high cost of insulin to a large audience not causing a drop in stock price would be highly suspect. I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.

But in a bear market, this bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.

Or it could have also been a coincidence... there's no way to know.

> bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.

I know this is orthogonal to the stock price drop, but this kind of bad publicity (gouging sick people in need of your product) actually turned out to be a good thing for the public and for overall justice.

> I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.

Your second sentence is probably true, but the first one is questionable.

It's well-known that there are high-frequency stock trading bots which watch Twitter, news headlines, etc.

High frequency trader bots watch random accounts? That seems like a bad strategy. Maybe they're watching news headlines - but that seems like a media problem where a storm of articles about nothing drive the very story they are talking about.

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