Two reasons that I would say it does not impact stock price:

1. WCG results or lack thereof does not benefit IBM in terms of revenue or earnings.

2. It is such a large company that WCG is just a miniscule part of it.

In addition to what was said above, all results are public domain. So even if IBM had some interest in the results of any particular project, it wouldn't matter. The researchers who use the service have to agree to this and other conditions or they can't participate.

Plus IBM is currently doing a 'pivot' as they like to say in Silicon Valley.' Their earnings have sucked for several years now. They've only managed to keep their stock price up because they've been borrowing to buy back shares to make it look like EPS was improving. In fact just the opposite has been the case.

However IBM has made some big bets like on cloud computing with their proprietary AI Watson. Personally, I think those bets will pay off but it will be years before they see the results. And that assumes that Watson can outclass all of the other machine learning efforts currently going on. I think they have a very strong lead in this field but we'll have to see. It wouldn't be the first time an innovative company had their lunch eaten by someone else. It wouldn't even be the first time for IBM.

IBM gets some recognition from sponsoring the program, but technically what we're doing it pretty primitive compared to what a system like Watson can do. 'Primitive' isn't bad of course, it's just not the sort of thing that is going to impact your stock prices.

The apps that we run might be sophisticated in many ways but those are the work product of the researchers not IBM.