Slashdot Mirror
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.
When you're talking about numbers like that then there is definitely a responsibility somewhere to try to prevent it happening again.
...perhaps they'll be more careful about whose luggage they lose.
Time to stop using you xBox to run your financial empire, kids. Get the grizzled old traders back and fire the children.
I laughed so hard my coworkers made me go outside.
I love Google.
ed duval the very last person
Slashdot Idle had this story 24 hours before the main page.....
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
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 would be so awesome if the Google news bot was able to dig up some old dirt on Google that would make it's ~$450 per share stock crater... that would be an awesome site to behold.
I doubt it'll happen, since there haven't been any previously bad financial reports that could come back and masquerade as current news, but you never know.
It also serves to show how fragile our financial system is (just read the "what if" reports on what would have happened if Fannie Mac/Freddie Mae were allowed to go under... it would have been BAD). Sure, United gained back most of its value but it's still down a good bit of cash. It reminds me of when Abbie Hoffman threw a bunch of $1 bills onto the NYSE trading floor and TRADING STOPPED as the floor traders ran around picking up the bills.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
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've noticed a few time lately that the BBC News site's 'most read' list contains stories from years ago. It's very misleading because the links are on the main news page and the date, although present at the top of each story, is fairly subdued. I've been caught out a couple of times by this. Of course, once a story gets on the 'most read' list everyone clicks on it pushing it further up the list and prolonging its being there.
I'll have to point to this next time someone finds an error on my website.
Never happen.
Every brokerage house in the country is increasing their presence in "Automated Trading". The majority of these companies income is now made on small percentage point fluctuations brokered very fast. With the automated systems pulling in that much more money than the traditional ones, and with more algorithms being designed (and held as proprietary info), what would YOU do?
Ridiculous? Yes. Not going away? Also Yes.
Might as well vote to bring back the horse drawn carriage since the price of gas has risen so much lately.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
After reading TFA, it sounds like google is LEAST to blame out of the many many automated systems involved. First of all, the damn story should have been dated. That's the tribune's fault. Google doesn't seem to have claimed it as today's news, only ranked it high up. No one should have ever reprinted the story without actually CHECKING WITH UNITED AIR FIRST. That's neither google nor the tribune's fault. That's every service that reprinted the story as new without verifying its fault. Google and tribune seem least at fault because neither ever gave any indication it was a new story.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Google better bot-up its legal team.
Google News crawled an obscure reprint...
The story was then picked up by other news aggregators...
This triggered automated trading programs...
Is there even a live person at the wheel anymore? Or is SkyNet just fucking with us now?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
That's more likely than you think. The equity lost by those dumping the stock automatically (for a loss) will be tragic for those involved. On the other hand, the sharp traders who noticed what happened and bought at the discounted price had turned a tidy profit by the end of the day. All in all, a day later the stock is right back to riding the whim of the indexes and no one other than those who traded in that window are affected.
Cautionary tale for the Web 2.0/semantic web or whatever they are calling it now.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"It's my first day."
So the question becomes, how can we replicate this issue at the time of our choosing and tank a stock to buy it up? Personalyy I would love to try to get a seat on the microsoft board.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
I am by no means a lawyer but it sounds like the automated trading software has the majority of the blame since it is the one that actually intiated the trade. So what if google descided to reprint old news...nothing wrong with that.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I wonder who gets sued for this. Obviously Google's Crawler was at fault, somewhat, but that one error shows a flaw in a lot of other news site handling of information (or misinformation as this was), especially Bloomberg - all for lack of actually double checking sources and dare I mention, actual facts, before running a story.
In a day and age where everyone is automating news feeds, I'd like to believe that someone out there should be responsible for approving posts - much like how I do syndicated posts on my wordpress blog...of course, asking for someone to take responsibility for anything in America is asking too much anyway...
Ave Molech Setting
... "INTENTIONAL" evil.
NO SIG
Maybe if the industry you were in wasn't on the brink of an economic disaster for the past 7 years an old story being dug up by Google News wouldn't have had such a drastic impact.
Money doesn't just evaporate, I'm sure it's still somewhere!
it's nobody's fault, but your dog is dead, lolz, but it's unlikely to happen again, at least to your dog
I'm sure if someone had called UAL to do some fact checking before making a financial decision, they would have been told it was untrue.
It kinda highlights the deficiency in our media that this could make it past an editor. My guess there was no editor checking it before the South Florida Sun-Sentinel pushed the publish button.
With the automated systems pulling in that much more money than the traditional ones, and with more algorithms being designed (and held as proprietary info), what would YOU do?
Find their buttons... Then press them.
Deleted
I wonder who gets sued for this. Obviously Google's Crawler was at fault, somewhat
How do you figure that? It's doing what it's supposed to. The problem wasn't the crawler, it's the people who thought the crawler was some kind of magic AI that could find relevant stories for them.
Ouch.
That said, are automated trading systems going to be this decade's great Ponzi scheme? I can't believe so many people can be so lazy with their investments to send the stock tumbling that much.
It looks like the ones who'll ultimately get burned from this are are those who are careless with their money. But how soon before people take advantage of viral networking to manipulate Google's algorithms for determining popular news, bring up old doom and gloom articles to intentionally tank a stock so they can buy while it's cheap?
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
It's gambling, it isn't investing.
Deleted
...But the next day it magically created about 800 million as the stock climbed back up. Assuming it recovers back to the previous level, which it should, no money will have been lost. It will simply have moved from poor, knee-jerk investors to smarter investors.
You're kidding me, right? Stockholders entrusted their assets to managers who entrusted their assets to tradebots. The tradebots/managers made bad decisions. How can the tradebots/managers/stockholders now blame anyone else for their incompetence?
Anyone who sells something of value based on a rumor this thin deserves what they get. As for those who didn't sell and still lost value, anyone who has been in the stock market for very long knows that you sometimes get what others deserve.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
"It's because Google is going to launch their own airline."
Yeah, they'll call it "United Airlines BETA".
So a reader of an obscure newspaper voted up/submited an old archived story, it got popular from several others, got picked up by google news, then by market traders and, well, the perfect storm happened?
That is not the first time that automated scan of internet from google made big damages (remember the "hidden" passwords/files/ftplistings/etc that could still be found searching?), because people somewhat misbehaving creating sites, but at least is focused enough to be able to give some fast good hint on how much money was lost.
Now that google are scanning old newspapers, cant wait till someone pick a "new" story about the market crash of 1929.
My guess there was no editor checking it before the South Florida Sun-Sentinel pushed the publish button.
The FLorida Sun-Sentinel published it in 2002. The date on the page was 2002. It was in their archives. They had a link on their website pointing to popular stories in their archives. Such links change minute by minute.
It's Bloomberg who should have had an editor in the loop.
"Oops."
This smells like a case of the Frankenstein complex to me. Although Google News may have linked the article in its recent results because of the fresh link on the Sun Sentinel home page, both the WSJ article and the Forbes investigation make it very clear that the problem was a human editor who misinterpreted the original article and posted it as new information (with a freshly written headline) in a by-subscription-only investor information service that is carried on Bloomberg trading terminals.
A human saw the story, failed to check the date (there was no date line at the top of the article), refreshed it with a new headline, and republished it on a trading service that was believed to be a source of credible journalism by its readers.
How and why would a 5-year old story about bankruptcy suddenly get "voted up" in at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel so that news aggregators (and google-bot) would pick it up? Sounds very suspicious to me.
So are you telling me that I could set up a "click-bot" to vote up old-news and make myself rich in the ensuing mayhem?
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.
Wouldn't there have been a date from when the article was written?
There was. The correct date was on the original article.
Sounds to me like someone else may have helped this happen.
The guy who reposted the article without reading it.
But I can't remember the name of it for the life of me. Basically the plot is that someone triggers a financial collapse by selling a bunch of a certain stock to get the automated systems to kick and and cause a cascade effect. Who knew it could really happen? If anyone knows what the book is called, I will give them a cookie.
Wow. Take a look at Monday's trading history for UAUA. Look at that drop. And notice that it happened on huge volume; several hundred million dollars changed hands within fifteen minutes. It wasn't just a few traders running the price down in light trading.
The stock hasn't come back all the way. It's still down 20% for the week.
Here's the newspaper page that started it all, as archived by Google.
No, what the article makes clear is the way the stockmatket is run now has nothing to do with "investing" in a company because you think they offer good products or services so they will grow and prosper in the future, and everything to do with it being it a big stupid gambling casino that has zilch to do with traditional investing. A congame run by charlatan conmen to take advantage and leech off the suckers. Goes hand in pickpocketing hand with those big financial "industry" thieves who are quick to grab megaprofits when they successfully con people into taking their toxic waste pieces of paper, and right there with those same hands out taking tax payer bailouts when they run up against serious losses because of their overwhelming greed being the most important aspect to their "busy-ness".
How and why would a 5-year old story about bankruptcy suddenly get "voted up" in at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Hurricanes Hanna and Ike making Florida newsworthy, attracting a bunch of people to newspapers like the Florida Sun-Sentinel who weren't familiar with the paper's layout and archives?
Another point that no one seems to be picking up on is the problem of a lot of news sites neglecting to include a dateline on their stories. I've run in to this a number of times, and it makes it difficult to determine the relevance of a given story. It's a very simple thing to include the date the story was published, but a lot of sites don't seem to bother.
I don't care why you're posting AC
All these comments and no one mentions Sneakers? Google is Ben Kingsley!
"It's about who controls the information."
Seems like there is an opportunity to create a purely online stock exchange, where all subscribers trade on equal terms?
Seems like there's at least one purely online stock exchange. Though that may not mean internet, and I'm not sure about equal terms.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
So... if Google newsbot picked up the story about Google newsbot's near destruction of United Airlines... would that make it self-aware? :D [/joke]
Anyway, one interesting thing this story brings up is our over-reliance on automated systems... Googlebot picks up the old story, a financial firm's automated query systems sees the story as a recent one, the system spreads the story to its feeds, and it winds up as an alert in Bloomberg (the trading software, for those who've never worked with a trading firm) and other financial systems.
It's such a very fragile structure, wherein a single word can irrevocably alter the fate of a company, or even events around the world (butterfly effect, and a company like UA is a big butterfly). In the end, machines won't have to enslave mankind to take over the world. We've gladly handed them the keys and gone on vacation in the Bahamas...
If you look back a bit further, you can see that the stock price has been drifting down for several days and that it's a little above the trend for Sep 5-8. I doubt that this glitch has made any significant difference to the stock price.
Sounds like the modern equivalent of "Blue Horse Shoe Loves Anacot Steel"
- Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), Wall Street
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
'Alright class, yesterday we learned how to automatically sell stocks protect our money. Today I'll show you why you shouldn't ever do that'
I think a few day traders missed class that day.
But clearly you have something better to say...
And you guys whine about mods missing SLASHDOT dupes. Wow.
Another thing that many smaller news sites don't include is the city and state that the news is from, especially if it is local news and there is nothing to tell you where it is from.
AP news articles usually have the location at the start of the article, which makes a lot of sense.
Aren't news articles supposed to answer:
Who?
What?
Where?
When?
Why?
How?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
But you see, Google is duping a story from SIX YEARS AGO! They have now out-slashdotted slashdot.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
...die by the sword.
If you're trading based on news, minutes or seconds of advantage, and arbitrage, then you'll occasionally get nailed by something unforseen. Like a two-or three year old news story that 'looks' new all of a sudden.
So is someone watching over this, ready to pull the plug if something doesn't smell right? Nope. When the timing is so short, you're at the mercy of the system.
Besides, most of these programs are pure arbitrage. Which is sort of the 'greater fool' theory in play. You make money at someone else's expense. Like they didn't know about something, and you sell out a minute before they find out.
In this case, justice, if there is any, is won by those who saw the activity, realized the mistake, bought low and sold back high. Too bad, big institutional investor. You lost this round.
I can't shed a tear.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, apparently the mods are doing what they're told today so let's see if this works. You are completely right.
Especially Americans. Witness the politial campaigns.
Not only is it unnecessary, but such a law would be completely unenforceable. Look at how much trouble online gaming servers have in preventing people from running bots which play their characters for them.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
for the anti-capitalist perl hackers!
The stock hasn't come back all the way. It's still down 20% for the week.
Yeah, but it's still down less than 10% for the day, which was supposedly caused by this Google problem. If anything this may attract some attention to the stock, and once the CFO's pacemaker kicks in they'll be OK.
The people who sold down on automatic trading pissed away an enormous amount of wealth, and smarter people profited. This is fantastic - they got punished by the market for their stupidity and their wealth was transferred where it can do more good.
I feel sorry for the people who trusted them to manage their wealth, I do, but hopefully this was a small percentage of everybody's holdings and everybody is the wiser about automated trading.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The news and financial systems are so intertwined that any strange news will make financial systems go crazy. We need to desensitizing the system so any news needs to be verified before it is take to be true. Unfortunately our society has gone from a "think before go" to a "go before think" so now we are suffering the consequences for this now.
Anyways I saw that news item on my phone news message though that was bunch of male bovine feces but I double checked then I knew it was real nonsense. Pity we don't allow time to check all of our sources so we don't back pedal for a retraction later.
Might as well vote to bring back the horse drawn carriage since the price of gas has risen so much lately.
For people who can't afford the gas, that's already happening. In Cuba they're going back to oxen since they don't have the parts for tractors or a steady fuel supply.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
When a blip at a local Florida newspaper can combine with a trivial bug to destroy a major American airline in a morning, the economy and the "reporting" that the economy depends on is revealed to be a giant joke.
This episode was remarkable because it was huge, fast, and concentrated in a single high profile corporation. But how much of this broken system's smaller problems go "unnoticed"? Unnoticed as problems, at least, but showing up in all kinds of market valuations and economic decisions based on them that are all built on a landscape of errors, omissions and misunderestimations?
How can you trust an economy that makes mistakes like that? Anyone smart would find any alternative that's less crazy and put their money into it.
--
make install -not war
Gee let's see. Alarmist reports causes stock prices to rise/fall dramatically due to bad information. People make/lose a pile of money based on irrationality, armed with billions of dollars of other people's money. Welcome to every single day on the stock market.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Burn 1500 $100 notes and the value will still be around somewhere, because less cash circulating will cause a drop in prices, so everybody else's cash will be worth a little bit more. But drive your new Porsche into a wall and you'll see $150 thousand evaporate.
A $1 billion drop in market value means that there's $1 billion somewhere that left the stock market to be spent on other things. This causes inflation, everybody's cash will have a somewhat smaller value.
"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
I call bullshit.
If you knew a single thing about the market, you'd realise that abuse of the markets by regulators is NOT a partisan issue. The right is raping the market and the left is raping the market.
If we actually had a congress who followed the constitution, if we actually had sound money, if we actually had a stable federal budget, maybe we wouldn't be seeing the same boom/bust cycle that's chipping away at our wealth.
It's been a long time.
The stock didn't drop because Google News reported the story. It dropped because people read the story, not very carefully, and started selling in a panic. After that, of course, program trading tends to take over, and five minutes later people had noticed that it was a mistake and started buying again, real cheap, from people who were still panic-selling.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Who wants to bet that google has a control panel somewhere, inside of some html document, on an intranet computer deep inside of their evil lair that has buttons saying "Destroy United Airlines" "Destroy yahoo" "Destroy Microsoft". I know I sure as hell would if I had that sort of power/influence. :D
You may yet eat your words on this one :-)
This wasn't Google's, it was the Tribune that posted the story as new. Google just picked it up and republished it, as they do with all news, without any guarantee that it's accurate.
And the people who caused United to lose the money were automated trading programs. Maybe they should be made a bit more robust? Just a thought.
If ANYthing, this sounds like insider trading of a sort. They get legally sanctioned/approved early opportunity to alert cronies ahead of the rest of the common stock holders/traders.
However, the NPR report i heard, and submitted on
http://tech.slashdot.org/~davidsyes/firehose/
said the plunge and its return were both *fast* and paper-trades. Sounds to me that if anyone gained or lost would be those who tried to take advantage of the short (duration) time period in which to alert buddies to get ready to dump stocks early or to prepare to buy up low-priced shares related to the plunge predicted to happen.
So, of this can be likened to a form of insider trading, then those not involved might feel lucky.
Also, if anyone *did* gain much or if anyone dumped early, i would expect that they would expect to hear from the SEC about insider tips. Then again, what do i know?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You generally don't want to buy and hold volatile stocks...
GPL Deconstructed
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.
... it will be now
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
For some reason ElectricEuphonium's article is scored 0, but there's no moderation log.
Particularly with someone at Bloomberg making the comment that they wouldn't check an article if it came from the Sun-Sentinel. I would expect that they would at least read the article, for goodness sake.
Google's bot did what it was supposed to do, it posted someone else's news with all the information provided to it by it's source (in this case, the source lacked a date).
The financial sites that picked this up and ran it as their own information have a responsibility to CHECK THEIR FACTS and ESTABLISH THE CREDIBILITY OF THEIR SOURCES. This is a result of an overzealous pursuit of a scoop.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
Attributing emotions to "the market" is irrational anthropomorphism. Only individuals can have emotions. Usually what looks like emotion (e.g. panic) in the market is an epiphenomenon of many individuals each acting rationally but not in concert.
Based on the recent drop in demand for oil, I think people are actually going back to walking.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
But google newer claimed it was todays news, so what make you assume that they dated it as todays news??
How about outlawing speculation altogether? Then a news gaff like that wouldn't matter!
*ducks*
I think many problems could actually be solved by eliminating the market features that make it possible to make money on a tanking stock. Without short selling the market would probably have a much stronger tendency to self correct. A greater tendency to self correct would yield less volatility overall and less volatility could yield less reactionary bidding as the consequences of not reacting immediately wouldn't be as severe.
Exactly. People who watch the news all day going BUY SELL BUY SELL are just asking to lose money on mistakes like this.
Cocaine effectively evaporates.
Hookers, however, only evaporate if you're into a very special kind of kink.
Uh, not that I would know.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone. But they've always worked for me." --Dr. Hunter S.
Anybody investing in the Airline industry is either a fool or a madman. Invest in teleportation technology instead.
Google files for Chapter 7 (Say, via The Onion,) said pseudo story gets aggregated by Google's news reader, other news agencies grab on to said pseudo story, all I have to do is wait for Google's stock to drop to $3 (Fine, maybe $50...) Then I can ride the upswing?
Step 1: Write pseudo story for The Onion
Step 2: Wait for story to be repeated by reputable news channels
Step 3: Profit!
This practice has failed catastrophically in the past, and been likened to "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller". The problem is twofold. First, to make any money at this, you have to throw a lot of money behind it. A 0.1% gain over an extremely short period of time is only worthwhile if it's an 0.1% gain on millions, or billions of dollars. The problem is, sometimes something unexpected happens (the asian economy has a crisis, sub-prime lending collapses, you get a bad tip that United is going belly up), and instead of the 0.1% gain, you end up with a big loss.
So, yes, I understand that the idea of a "free money machine" is very appealing, but people are ignoring the risk. That needs to stop. It's a risk to the stability of the economy.
No they didn't.
Many stories don't ahve a date on them. It's the editor who thought it was new and wrote a new headlines for its fault. If it is anybody fault at all. Sometime shit happens and there is no one to blame.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not when a large portion of articles don't ahve a date, so in ti sensible to assume an article published today it today. A human editor got a story from archive, wrote a new headline and published it.
Google acted properly for this industry and work. Assume a no date is from 1970 then you lose a lot of articles and as such loose out in the market.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is kinda like an updated market version of the Orson Wells' "War of the Worlds" event.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Ah yes, the editor is at fault. Google can't possibly be at fault. Hint: stories from reputable sources virtually always have a date attached to them (exceptions are incredibly rare) - for copyright purposes if nothing else. A story without a date should have been a major red flag for the bot. Period.
With bots making these mistakes I have high hopes that the machine vs man war will never take place, or is this their evil plan to slowly destroy us one stock broker at a time.
Can I bum a sig?
We're selective.
you had me at #!
Dutifully reporting the lies of a dishonest government and campaigning politicians?
you had me at #!
/. has HUMAN EDITORS??
you had me at #!
Might as well vote to bring back the horse drawn carriage since the price of gas has risen so much lately.
Rest assured, the horse and cart is surely coming back (unlike cheap oil). There's a good forward looking investment idea (so was stockpiling oil).
you had me at #!
if the real Skynet had said it.
you had me at #!
To prove it's just as powerful as real data!
you had me at #!
It did.
you had me at #!
From the folks who brought you 2000 and 2004, the third in a series of tilted elections is nearly ready.
you had me at #!
... bought UAL stock at just $3? Oh wait.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Look at the trend for UAL, and you'll see that it was going down anyways. I don't think the blip caused by the error made nearly as much difference as the WSJ article would lead you to believe.
All investing is speculation. Every investment by its very nature has the potential for loss.
For a long time I've wondered how stable and accurate a stock exchange would be if you could only sell your stock after 1 month + 1month*rnd() after you bought it. If everyone knew that they were holding on for an average for 1.5 months, I'm guessing most of the short-term speculation and sniping would go away.
Left would be those people who were fine with long-term investments, based on sound research.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
If Slashdot is basing karma on single posts that's just broken.
... hijack some newspaper web site (easy enough to do) and "publish" his own story about some company going into bankruptcy. Then he or his partner buys up the stock at a discount and waits for the story to be retracted before selling it at the normal price. Someone has to buy stock for the price to be driven back up.
This is just a variation of the old stock scams previously done by email on small penny stocks. But with newspaper web site hijacking, Google news expanding it, and automated trading on Wall Street, this can be done on larger stocks where hundreds of people would be buying in at the bottom, obscuring the scammer in the crowd.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This now shows what runaway effect all these automated systems can now have. In light of this:
Now that Google knows what sort of effect they can start in the market place, they should be at least sidelining data their robots pickup from news sites that cant be date verified by the robot, and a human should verify it. No other way around it or they risk starting another, possibly bigger, nastier chain reaction.
Of course, people downstream of all this information should make their own changes to their own systems.
But since Google's systems started it, they should accept part of the blame.
This system is very much designed. It's defined by a small group of huge banks, foreign debt buyers, large "market maker" brokers, and the entites that are more than just one of those at a time. It's governed by loads of regulations, mostly installed to squash competition and protect banks. All trading in corporations about which any sudden bad news is believable, because most bad news is suppressed, but everyone can tell that bad news is rampant. All of which news spin is of course designed, by a consensus rather than a conspiracy.
Yes, our economy is "evolving". Everything evolves, even despite mighty efforts to design in the face of vaster natural trends. But the way our economy is designed right now, and has been for many years, is so dependent on unsupportable debt that's finally running out, on extracting resources (and dumping waste into "unused" places) that are finally running out, and on naive gullibility from every quarter except the bankers, we're looking like the one essential part of evolution: extinction.
America's extremely weak now, as measured by capital, because our outstanding debts total more than the entire planet (including us) produces in more than a year. Debt owed in substantial amounts to some of our fiercest enemies, China and OPEC, which are in turn extremely strong. All economic indications are that the US is not fit to survive in this environment, and is merely on life support while our predators switch diets. That might be an accident. But it's a fatal one.
--
make install -not war
...for not dating stuff on their site. I'm constantly running across information that is certainly authoritative, but since there is no indication of when the page content was updated there's no way to know whether or not it's accurate. With today's product life cycles in the tech industry a date is crucial for accuracy of information.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
When I click on TFA all I get is a blank page. When I view source, all I see is:
[html comment code start --] fastdynapage - sbkj2kwebp01 - Thu 09/11/08 - 00:13:47 EDT
[--!/html comment code end]
But most disturbing is when I visit the site that is linked, the Wall street Journal online, there's NO mention of anything to do with United & google, and a search even draws a blank:
http://online.wsj.com/public/search/page/3_0466.html?KEYWORDS=untied%20airlines%20google%20news&mod=DNH_S
Where's my tinfoil hat?! Oh wait, I'm still on Slashdot. Once NPR covers this tho'...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
I smell Pliant Obsequious Supplicant wretches... That said, risk my so-called and worthless 'Excellent karma' in saying in protestation that i will have NO faith in the firehose nor any expectation of surmounting the cronies, and i accept defeat and simper in the penalty box. Disgustingly saddening and demoralizing. i expect the on-alert, -1 smackdown/cloaking code to further suppress my comments...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I thought it was a secret plot by Google to launch their new Google Air at a fraction of the price they were looking at yesterday.
Just goes to show the fun that can happen when automated programs respond to automated programs. One wrong switch and Pandora is unleashed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
. . . don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
How much do you get from Microsoft for this kind of service these days?
It wasn't Google that screwed the pooch, it was Bloomberg... they passed the message on without even reading it, apparently, let alone verifying it with UAL or the paper.
The market is like Soylent Green. You might not recognize Grandma and Uncle Joe individually, but they and other people are what constitute it.
As long as people have emotions and the market is made up of people, the market will have emotions. They might be in concert sometimes and conflicting others, but the markets are always driven by intellect and emotion.
Heh, it happens a lot, my article about the whole "uwe boll not making the wow-movie" was also kept waiting for 3 days before some slashdot editor posted his version of the story.
Funniest was, my story had confirmation links, his didn't......
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Information is not illegal. It's how you act on it that creates a liability.
Information may not be illegal, but shouldn't MISinformation be? It is in some cases already.
The investors' programs sold low because of a typo in a source they trusted without verification. That's bad decision-making, automated, not Google's fault and not the Florida Sentinel Sun's fault. (typo intended)
Shout FIRE in a crowded theater when there isn't one, for example.
If you want to argue by analogy, make it fit. Consider a computer-controlled fire alarm. One that dials 9-11 based merely on speech-recognition of the word "fire" spoken by somebody in the room would be a good analogy to the programs in use for stop-loss on Wall Street. That was a stupid design. A sensible computer-controlled fire alarm at least checks for source(s) of heat, particulates and/or carbon monoxide. Instead of automatically dialing 9-11, it should also notify the property owner, who would then have to manually dial 9-11, if he decides the fire is real.
Instead of such a sensible algorithm, investors are automating sales based on one variable: stock price decrease. The same investors could make their stop-loss programs less risky to themselves by adding a method to send a TXT message to their BlackBerry (TM), with the ticker symbol, price decrease and time interval of the decrease. It could have a simple Y/N dialog, and depending on the number of shares they hold, they could then decide to check Bloomberg first, or just sell if they're reckless.
Redundancy and manual checks before important transactions are not novel concepts. Failure to require verification, and implementation of a design having a single point of catastrophic failure, were reckless choices. Google didn't write that faulty software. Those who did deserve to bear the full burden of the losses it caused. They have already enjoyed the full benefits of the same software, when it worked as intended without verification. Losses totaling $1.14B probably won't substantially improve programming in general, but it's a good start.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
But, i *do* get meta-moderator points. Maybe one or 2 times a week at times, it seems.
I prefer to comment (zany, semi-seriously, and seriously, too) so, I prefer to not moderate others, particularly not in a downward scoring. If i take strong umbrage to or disagreement with something someone wrote, i will weigh in with my own monologue/diatribe. But, I generally prefer to avoid conflict, especially avoiding capricious down-modding. This is why i feel the /. moderator system needs to be trashed/abolished and replaced with something that forces a lazy, vengeful, or friend-rubbing moderator to JUSTIFY their scoring or whatnot. They are NOT god, and the faster the owners of /. remember this, the better off /. will be. A scoring system is worthless if the scorers are not held accountable. Of course, source links are helpful. But links for and against the submitters' position would show balance.
As for the person calling me lazy, i ***DID*** hit publish my story (as opposed to share) for that story. The fact that there was not any rejection message of MY submission only shows someone was trying to not catch my attention that another's version got priority over mine. I included several sources, and even semi-editorialized. I guess it was hoped that i'd not be checking. That was a major insult. It's not as if i'm asking to be let in to the exclusive daily-doubles club.
I wish slashdot's owners would bust up the inside-boys-as-submitters and recognize that those of us who DO submit to the firehose are no less important. How would slashdot like it if enough harshly critical commentary spilled outside to more legitimate tech sites and caused real-named readers to be further tarred with a demeaning brush, even if they are good performers at work? Slash ASKS us for our participation. We participate. Yet, the cronies-club gets the lion share of submission displays. I would think there'd even be a metrics system to evaluate (positively?) those who pass on their meta-moderator points opportunities, opting instead to comment. I wonder if it metrics-monitors those who tend to down-mod people. After all, when i'm down-modded, i'm knocked to zero or -1, as if to suppress my posts.
So, unless/until /. starts playing revisionist history, more people need to read at below 0 to re-elevate capriciously down-modded articles/postings/comments. The firehose needs to be more visible, as in a running banner/vertical column/gutter stream so that READERS (not moderators) are the gatekeepers of what gets discussed and what gets replied to.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
This is one bad symptom of the incomprehensible good that is the evolution of human collective intelligence. Yes, a bad node can infect thousands of other nodes in an instant. And it can cost billions of dollars occasionally. But these costs pale in comparison to the benefits of the network effect and collective intelligence. Any corrective treatment for this "problem" will have a devastating cost to the global economy unless it is extremely precisely and accurately targetted.
A billion dollars is nothing compared to the wealth generated by the network effect and collective intelligence every day. It is a natural consequence, and it will happen again, many times. But it is a very small price to pay.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Maybe this event will prompt publishers of online media to display the date (and even time) in a more prominent position on the page... too many articles have a near-impossible-to-find-on-the-page publication dates.
"Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
The difference between natural selection and unnatural selection ("designed") is that humans do the designing, not "plankton, bacteria, ...". The economic entities that live and die are largely designed by that interlocking (by their Boards of Directors) group of a relatively very few people. Though their system does have plenty of bugs, which is what this story is about. Those bugs are the closer step to "natural selection". But that's no comfort, especially since the glitches are the rare interruption in the designed events.
The market doesn't "operate on its own". I don't know where you're getting that from, though it's quite the fad among techno "libertarians" to claim it (in generations past, all it took was reading enough Ayn Rand to be dangerous). I spent the 2nd half of the 1990s designing and deploying infosystems for banks, brokerages, insurance corps, and governments (municipal, provincial/state and federal), mostly in the financial districts of NYC and Toronto. I have advised the NYC City Council's tech committee for several years this decade. I am qualified to assure you that the economy, its transactions, its constraints, its directions, its barriers to entry, its players, its villains, are all highly designed. There's no room for "on its own". And though that doesn't mean that the bankers win every transaction, literally "at the end of the day" (CoB, the magic moment when transactions close in NYC at 4PM), the bankers win and everyone else loses, whenever there's an option. And there's always an option. Just ask Bear Stearns, or Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac, or any of a hundred other institutions you never heard of that got away with (often literal) murder in the past 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 years.
The global economy does indeed change and evolve. Indeed within the context of a complex environment, economic, technological, political, social and otherwise. But its evolution is guided at every step, even if that guidance isn't "omnipotent".
Which is exactly why I'm complaining about this collapse of UAL due to a newspaper blip catching a bug. Because that system sacrifices the resilience of the mythical "free market" for more assured growth for its managers. And when something like this happens, it shows that the "security" that the managers offer for their fees and lion's share of the upside is also largely mythical. The emperor wears no clothes. There is indeed an emperor, not just the law of the jungle, and everyone bows to him as he parades past. But he's naked, at least on more days than any legitimate emperor should be.
That's not "evolution", it's accidental genocide. Not nearly the same, when you're the one working to stay fit enough to survive, but don't have the emperor gene.
--
make install -not war
Yeah, like major US investment banks or multinational energy companies?
How about a $100 billion telecom company.
Maybe the Insurance industry has some stocks that don't have volatility? :-)
Just a friendly reminder that your statement is a tad absurd.
No, it just means my statement was underqualified.
You don't want to own poorly run, poorly situated, excessively risk-exposed or volatile stock.
Those companies do exist, but they exist almost outside the stock exchange since their core competency isn't making their stocks grow, it's making their company prosper.
GPL Deconstructed