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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.
Sounds like a sad Transformers sequel.
Almost as sad as the first one...
(If this doesn't get modded Insightful, I'm going to question the sanity of those who enjoy Shia LaBeouf's acting.)
This is an honest question -- do you have evidence that people are actually running bots *and making money* (over the long run)?
That's a very common thought, but based upon discussions I've heard on the Two Plus Two Pokercast podcast, including interviews with the guys who work on Polaris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_(poker_bot)), it seems unlikely that people are successfully running bots... at least for hold 'em. Maybe they are for Blackjack, but I don't even know if the online servers run blackjack games... and if they do, couldn't they just crank up the # of decks being used to make even a bot not worth it?