Slashdot Mirror
Tesla's April Fool's Joke Spoofs Market Algorithms
Okian Warrior writes Yesterday, Tesla's twitter feed and blog announced the new "W" Model. Meaning "Watch" (as in "wristwatch"), the announcement Included a photo of a watch spouting a cumbersome "Big Ben" glued to the face and including this text: "This incredible new device from Tesla doesn't just tell the time, it also tells the date. What's more, it is infinitely adjustable, able to tell the time no matter where you are on Earth. Japan, Timbuktu, California, anywhere! This will change your life. Reality as you know it will never be the same." Clearly, this was an April fool's joke as anyone who reads more than just the headline would immediately guess. The problem is that Bloomberg's fast response team did not. The algos, on massive volume, spiked TSLA stock higher by nearly 1%.
Check out the actual bump.
Anecdotal of course, but it sure seems like the announcement caused a massive spike in trading.
Also note that TSLA is up $4 over yesterday's close, so that's a total of 3%.
This is not nothing, given the scope of effort they made (a simple blog post and twitter announcement).
It wasn't only bad loans.
It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment, and then hoodwinked the rest of the world into buying it. It was a scam on a massive scale.
Essentially Wall Street and the financial industry made HUGE mistakes in who they loaned money to, and the lied to everybody else as they pawned off the debt.
It was a fucking pyramid scheme, ran by con artists, and then foisted off onto everybody else.
Had it only been bad loans, the idiots who made those loans would have been the ones to get hurt. But this was basically kiting checks and outright falsifying documents.
This wasn't caused by people who bought houses they couldn't afford. This was theft by the financial industry to cover their own stupid losses.
The scam could only have worked because the ratings agencies are complete whores who don't actually do anything meaningful other than "if you pay us, we'll say anything you want".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
380 days? That's not how exponential functions work. They clearly assumed 365 days: 1.01^365 = 37.78 (an extra 0.6 day would hit 38 exactly). With 380 days you'd be at 43.87, or with only 260 trading days that would be 13.29x
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Most stocks fluctuate more than 1% in a day.
Outside of a market crisis, they sure as fuck do not.
Yes they do. Besides Tesla, other companies that fluctuated more than 1% today include Microsoft, General Motors, Exxon, etc. Small companies tend to fluctuate even more. Perhaps you are thinking of the overall market average, which tends to fluctuate far less, because the individual companies generally do not move in unison.
Who says they got burned? The whole idea of these trading algorithms is that you can make money from any movement in the price due to your rapid response times, price instability like this is what they thrive on. That's exactly why they should be banned, they are the highest volume traders and they are motivated to destabilise prices which is the exact opposite point of the market.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.