>>70662348When a major pillar of an industry shows signs of instability, people hedge their bets that the other pillars may be suffering similar circumstances.
Usually companies don't commit unrepentant PR suicide, so when there's a sudden trend reversal it tends to indicate changing financial circumstances within their ecosystem that will eventually impact other companies, so people try to get ahead of the possible dip. This is especially true when that ecosystem is niche, and the specifics of it aren't something the average investor would be keeping up with.
To give an example; video rental used to be a big and stable industry in the US. In the span of a few years, the entire industry became unprofitable and collapsed. In the post mortem, it was understood that online streaming essentially rendered it obsolete and took all of its customers, but in the moment all investors saw was that a big pillar like Blockbuster was suddenly unprofitable. The correct choice at that point was to get the fuck out of the whole industry.
Companies pay a lot in labour expenses to staff their decisionmaking centers with competent individuals, whose output is checked and revised by other competent individuals up a chain of command to avoid bad public messaging and mitigate crises when they arise. Nobody ever really assumes that a company with as much net worth as Anycolor is just going to go out of its way to commit such an appalling unforced error and immediately turn the brand its spent years and billions establishing into fucking nuclear waste. From the outside this whole situation is utterly baffling.
