Twitter (TWTR) has been a bit of a disaster. Down 26.5% for 2016 and down 45% for the past year, this stock has been a massive disappointment. Part of the problem has been in declining revenue growth, with this quarter’s revenues expected to be up less than 10%. Those are atrocious numbers when you compare the growth of competitors like Alphabet (GOOG), rising over 15% year-over-year, and Facebook (FB), rising over 50% year-over-year. Some traditional media companies have higher revenue growth, which just makes TWTR’s monetization situation worse.

The market has all but given up on seeing TWTR monetize more effectively, and the stock price has depended less and less on fundamentals and more on rumors. This is bad for long-term investors in the stock, unless they believe there is an overlooked fundamental strength that will help revenues rise in the future. Whether there is or not, right now the stock is moving more on speculation about one possibility: an acquisition.

Investing on acquisition rumors can be lucrative, as anyone who held LinkedIn (LNKD) when Microsoft (MSFT) bought the company knows. But there weren’t any rumors swirling about LNKD getting bought out, which is partly why it jumped so much. Some would argue an acquisition was already priced in before Monday’s spectacular decline in TWTR shares, but even if it wasn’t, investors who bet on a future buyout need to do more than just play guesswork.

And for many investors, let alone the media reporting on Twitter, an acquisition has been more about guesswork than anything else. To be smarter and to invest more precisely on acquisitions, one need to do a little more than just follow the rumors—as TWTR’s recent extreme price volatility demonstrates.

To play the market in this fashion, we need to take a step back, put our models aside, and ask ourselves one question: why does one company buy another company? There are several possible reasons. It could simply be a matter of gaining a lucrative enterprise with strong cash flow that is undervalued by the market. Or maybe the company sees technology or market access in that firm that could help the acquiring firm expand. Or, as is frequently the case in tech, the company can help the acquiring firm make a strategic shift to adapt to growing competition.

Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, or Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp, are good examples of strategic shifts. Microsoft’s use of the social media firm remains unclear, but it surely has something to do with Microsoft’s focus on enterprise software and cloud distribution of technology solutions. In Facebook’s case, the acquisitions helped springboard the firm’s evolution into a mobile-first mosaic of apps that combine to create a good and powerful user experience.

With this perspective, we now need to ask ourselves: what would Twitter offer to an acquiring firm? What technology or market position does it have that can help companies’ evolving strategies?

There are answers to these questions, and they will differ from firm to firm. Disney’s (DIS) use of the company would be very different from Google’s. Discovering the potential benefit of TWTR to these companies is the first and essential step to then making a bet on whether an acquisition actually will or will not happen.