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Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B
cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.
... the power of the GOOG!!
There is a war going on for your mind.
...perhaps they'll be more careful about whose luggage they lose.
I laughed so hard my coworkers made me go outside.
I love Google.
ed duval the very last person
So the NewsBots trick the TradeBots, and we humans are left on the sidelines, hoping that we don't get squished in the process.
Sounds like a sad Transformers sequel.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
"Google regrets the error." What, it always works for the New York Times!
It's because google is going to launch their own airline.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Schmidt. Your flight has been delayed by two hours."
"Son of a... do you people know who I am? Dammit, get Brin on the phone."
I'll have to point to this next time someone finds an error on my website.
Altavista.... BAY-BEEEEEEEE!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"It's because Google is going to launch their own airline."
Yeah, they'll call it "United Airlines BETA".
"Oops."
First of all, this is fucking hilarious. Anyone with "computers that robotically [sic] troll the Web for news stories and execute stock trades automatically" deserves to reap the consequences of turning their destiny over to a computer.
Second, I doubt that any capitol was destroyed by this. Wealth didn't "evaporate," it merely moved from stupid people to smarter people.
I only wish I were one of the smarter people, who bought some stock worth $12 for $3. I should write a program to watch for that sort of thing happening, and then automatically buy-- oh wait.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'll bet some intern at the original newspaper who posted this six-year-old article to the paper's website early on a hangover-laden Monday morning will take the fall for not copy-pasting the dateline. Poor kid. What a resume-builder, though!
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Plenty of people think they're investing in individual stocks: they research the company, buy stock, and hold it for many years. I agree with you: they're fooling themselves.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Or is SkyNet just fucking with us now?
Yes, I am.
I mean, yes, it is.
An automated submission editor would notice that the same story had been posted previously, so it would take about two days before someone realized the bots were running the show.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"Buy and Hold" is generally good, but if the stock's going bankrupt, holding it any longer isn't going to do you much good. You've got to know when to fold them.
(I once used a similar technique back during the Boom&Crash years, called "Wasn't paying attention that month", which cost me most of the value of a stock I held too much of - it went from ~60 to ~3, and never recovered past about ~5.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Only an idiot defaults a missing date to today. Sensible defaults are 0000-00-00 and 1970-01-01, or their equivalent, according to context.
I want to be your friend, how do I start?
... bought UAL stock at just $3? Oh wait.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars