Selerity's web trawl moves markets

Selerity, a little-known company that gathers data for traders, came under the spotlight on Tuesday after it broadcast Twitter's first-quarter earnings nearly an hour ahead of schedule, sending the messaging platform's shares plunging.

The New-Jersey based company trawls the web for market-moving financial information and feeds it to clients, a valuable service for high speed traders who can push the data directly into their automated trading systems.

Selerity was founded by Ryan Terpstra, who had previously built a machine-readable quantitative news feed for Thomson Reuters, and is backed by Tom Glocer, the former Thomson Reuters chief executive. Selerity's clients include institutional, retail and sellside investors.

Selerity uses web scraping software to search websites of public companies, governments and social media. In the case of earnings releases, Selerity's software looks for company URLs that are similar to that of previous quarterly results.

Selerity says it found Twitter's earnings announcement on its investor relations website, where it had been publicly posted by Nasdaq's Shareholder.com, who manages Twitter's investor site.

"Today's $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter's Investor Relations website investor.twitterinc.com. No leak. No hack," Selerity tweeted.

The Twitter earnings release may not have been linked from another page on the site, and it was only live for 45 seconds, according to Nasdaq, so it would not have been easily accessible to an individual browsing the web.

It is unclear whether machines or humans - or both - picked up on Selerity's Twitter news to send the stock 25 per cent lower on Tuesday afternoon.

This is not the first high-profile "leak" from Selerity. Last December it discovered that ADP, the paycheck processor, had posted its monthly employment data on its website ahead of schedule.

And in 2011 Selerity stumbled upon Microsoft's quarterly earnings information - which was published an hour before the scheduled release on Microsoft's website - and sent the data to its clients, forcing the software group to release its results early.

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