Analysis: Twitter reaction to Steve Job’s death

Image via CrunchBase

I was wondering how the death of the poor Steve Jobs has influenced social medias, in this particular case twitter.

With a short search on tredistic I’ve noticed that the messages with the word “Steve” reached the 17.6% of the tweets at 2AM GMT+2, and slowly fading down, with another lower peak of 8,5% of “twitter share” around 9AM when Europe was waking up.

What’s also interesting is that before the sad announce, the conversations about Steve Jobs and his health status was around zero and then they did an exponential growth. Now, a day later his death, the buzz is slowly going back to zero again as a sign that most people was talking about that because they felt obliged to follow the trend of speaking and honor that awesome person.

As you can see in the chart below, even the conversation about Apple did not reach such a level of conversation during the keynote presenting the iPhone 4s, and did a big leap on the wave  of Steve’s death.

What is Credit Rating: meaning and why it’s so important

Rating (def.) is a synthetic evalutation made by an external independent subject, on the ability and will of a borrower, to face the payment of the capital and interests, related to an emission of debt securities, placed or to be placed, as stated in the contractual obligation.

To be more simple it consists of an alphanumerical symbol that can be easily understood and interpreted by anyone, and it’s useful because with just a letter or a number you can compare different emission with ease.

But probably you are wondering why rating and rating agencies wear such an important role in markets, and why their decision can influence investors so much.

That’s simple.. Rating is a very important cognitive element in determination of  the interest rate payed by the borrower. The interest rate is in fact composed by 2 elements:

• the benchmark (fixed): that is the distinctive rate for securities with the same duration and structure, and express the needs of units in deficit (borrowers).
• spread (variable): that express the needs of units in surplus (investors), and changes based on the perception of risk of the issuer.

So, the lower the rating is the higher is the spread the issuer must pay to the investors.

Rating is also useful because it determines if a security is of investment grade or non investment grade (speculative), and this distinction is important too because some subjects, for example pension funds, cannot invest in a financial instrument that’s not of investment grade.

For a slightly clear view of this distinction check the table below.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

‎”No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” Steve Jobs – Stanford University 2005