Investors appeared to take Talend SA’s narrow earnings miss Thursday uncharacteristically hard, but it turns out the reason had little to do with its earnings report.

The data integration company reported a first-quarter loss of 19 cents per share, a penny worse than consensus estimates of a loss of 18 cents. However, revenues jumped 42 percent, to $46.8 million, better than the $45.7 million consensus. And Talend offered second-quarter guidance that was in line with expectations. So why did the stock drop 10 percent in after-hours trading?

It turns out that, at about the time earnings were released, one of the company’s early investors had unexpectedly transferred 1.5 million shares to partners. As often happens in that scenario, many of those partners promptly sold their shares, resulting in a surge of selling activity just as the earnings news hit.

So as Talend executives were delivering upbeat comments on their earnings call about a doubling of cloud subscription licenses and strong response to its new line of self-service applications, more than a half -million shares were being dumped, or about 2 percent of all shares outstanding. For a company whose trading volume averages a little more than 300,000 shares a day, the shock sparked a mini sell-off.

“One point 5 million shares suddenly landed on the desks of people who didn’t intend to own it, so their tendency was to put it back in the market,” Talend Chief Executive Mike Tuchen said in an interview with SiliconANGLE today. Tuchen said he was taken aback by the large transfer, which he didn’t learn about until this morning.

Large investors typically notify a company before divesting large parts of their holdings in order to avoid such a shock to the system. “In the past we’ve done some well-coordinated sell-downs where we took the vast majority of the overhang off the table through multiple transactions,” Tuchen said. “This was a surprise.”

Talend stock steadied slightly today, finishing about 4 percent off its pre-earnings high. Tuchen said he spent most of the morning on the phone trying to reassure spooked institutional investors that the company’s financials are sound. But even the most carefully coordinated announcements can’t control the market’s reaction. “It is what it is,” Tuchen sighed.

Image: Talend/Facebook