I will be more direct.
Yes, of course we know it's theoretical, because you didn't actually make the profit you reported. Because if you actually owned this portfolio and looked at your brokerage statement you would see you do not in fact have the large profit the website portfolio indicates for INSM, and you would not be reporting such a large gain here.
This is how I view it:
You theoretically bought about 22,000 shares 5-5-10 for $1.04. You put this up in a theoretical portfolio and let time pass. Apparently every time you access the portfolio, the mechanics of the thing cross multiply the number of shares you have entered by the stock price. (That stock price being roughly $12 per share now for the 22,000 shares that were entered. And so the portfolio shows a gain of $244K for this stock.)
What happened on 3-3-11: There was a stock split. A 1:10 split, according to Yahoo. That's a reverse split. For every shareholder who had 10 shares before the split they only have one share after the split. Which means where you had roughly 22,000 before the split, after 3/3/11 your portfolio should have been adjusted to reflect that you now have 2200 shares. And that changes the profit picture considerably.
Whoever or whatever site maintains the portfolio did not account for the change.
Yahoo did though:
finance.yahoo.com
Not sure how a black swan is defined to everyone's agreement. If the stock had actually gone up 12x in a year ($1.03 to $12), I guess I'd say it would be unexpected or unusual enough to be a black swan. Doubling or more, that's common enough to see, and maybe could be predicted from some stocks. For me, I'd say very nice catch with INSM, but as Yahoo shows, it's no black swan. |
