Microvision Stock Gets Whipsawed by Blog Post

Stockholders in Microvision, the Redmond, WA-based maker of visual display technology, have gone on a wild ride this week. The stock fell as much as 20 percent on Monday after someone who claimed to work for a hedge fund wrote a post on a widely-read investor site, Seeking Alpha, that bashed the company. The Seattle P-I’s Joseph Tartakoff has an interesting story about the murky identity of who wrote the article, and some apparent inaccuracies it contained.

Microvision’s shares gained ground on Tuesday, and have recovered some more today, climbing 1.3 percent to $3.17 at 11:40 a.m. Eastern time. That’s still down 4 percent from when it opened trading on Monday, so if the author of the article truly was betting shares would fall, then he or she is still coming out ahead.

Author: Luke Timmerman

Luke is an award-winning journalist specializing in life sciences. He has served as national biotechnology editor for Xconomy and national biotechnology reporter for Bloomberg News. Luke got started covering life sciences at The Seattle Times, where he was the lead reporter on an investigation of doctors who leaked confidential information about clinical trials to investors. The story won the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award and several other national prizes. Luke holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and during the 2005-2006 academic year, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.