Well, for starters, the reason behind the discrepancy is likely due to the fact that Netflix recently split its stock 7-for-1. That means that the company issued six new shares for each share of existing stock, making each individual share worth only one-seventh as much. So if analysts had expected Netflix to earn 32 cents a share before the stock split, dividing those estimates by 7 would mean that the analysts were expecting about 4 cents of earnings per share of the new Netflix stock.
Maybe a reporter for the AP messed up the math on Netflix, using the old, pre-split estimates instead of the correct, post-split ones.
But there’s another possibility: maybe a robot is to blame.
Last year, the AP struck a deal with a company called Automated Insights, which makes automated reporting software that can write certain types of stories without human assistance. Among the things Automated Insights’ software can do is write simple corporate earnings stories, using numbers it pulls in from an automated feed. The AP now publishes more than 3,000 earnings stories per quarter with Automated Insights’ help.
La diffusion brute des dépêches AFP et des communiqués de presse c’était déjà se tirer une balle dans le pied, mais le journalisme automatique par des robots, ça devient vraiment désespérant. Même sans parler des erreurs : Quelle est la valeur ajoutée ? Où est la mise en contexte et l’analyse ?
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