Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of acquisition and product launch announcements on the share price of the "Big Five Technology" companies namely Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, which together accounted for more than 200 billion dollars of merger and acquisition investments between 2018 and 2020 (Lekkas, 2019). Using a sample of 457 acquisition announcements, 459 prod-uct launch announcements, and 4,101 self-published articles in the study period of 2010 to 2018, we show that product launch announcements does affect the share price of the "Big Five Technology" compared to acquisition announcements. We also show a positive correlation between the independ-ent variable i.e. the number of self-published articles ± 15 days of an event, and the dependent varia-ble, i.e. the influence that this event has on the company's share price.