A small US company nearly doubles in value due to investor error.

In early February, Snap Inc, the firm behind popular social media platform Snapchat, announced that it planned to raise $3bn in a stock market listing.

The news got investors excited. But some got a little overexcited and began investing right away in an unrelated company called Snap Interactive.

Almost overnight the value of the little-known US start-up, which specialises in real-time video communication and dating apps, nearly doubled as traders believed they were buying shares in the firm behind Snapchat.

This isn’t the first time such an incident has occurred. Shares in Oculus VisionTech Inc increased by 155% after Facebook announced plans to buy Oculus VR in 2014.

More recently, during the height of the US president race, stock in a Chinese company whose name sounds like ‘Trump wins big’ surged by nearly 10%. The company Chuan Da Zhi Sheng is a homophone for “Trump wins big”.