Behold, the power of automated systems!

[theweaselking]

Users viewing a South Florida Sun Sentinel article from 2002 about United Airlines' near-bankruptcy voted it up and got it ranked highly.

Google's spiders found the article, saw it with no dateline, and reposted it as new news.

Automated trading systems saw this and sold stock.

Stock price dropped from $12 to $3, evaporating $1.13 billion in shareholder wealth.

(EDIT: Story from HERE. Fucking WSJ is still down, IHT is in.)

Comments

[zastrazzi.livejournal.com]

No fair blaming automation. The critical flaw here was that voting remained enabled for an ancient article, and that the article wasn't dated.

If one of those flaws had not existed, the problem would never have recurred.

Having said that, it's time to go find a similar story, vote it up and then buy the vastly undervalued stock :)

[elffin.livejournal.com]

Had the automated web-publishing program used be the SFSS included a prominent "NO DATELINE GIVEN" in machine-readable format, or posted an actual dateline on the news story as it ought to have, the problem would not have happened.

Had the automated news aggregators been programmed to post a prominent "NO DATELINE GIVEN" in machine-readable format, the problem would not have happened.

Had Bloomberg done their due diligence and programmed their systems to hold such news to be vetted by an analyst, and /only then/ be passed as news: The problem would not have happened.

Had the automated stock-selling systems been programmed to check the date on news reports and to divert such news to an analyst, the problem would not have happened.

Had the automated stock-selling systems been programmed for analyst intervention at a sane threshold as ought to be done by any decent trading portfolio, this would not have happened.

It is one of the reasons my employerwhoshallremainnameless does not employ automation systems: Due Diligence is actually taken seriously here.

Bloomberg just lost massive quantities of credibility and trust. Anyone whose portfolio just lost value because their trader had this kind of automated system running - those traders just got busted.

[ismarc.livejournal.com]

I love automated greed machines. It's so much fun to watch the chicken little snowball effect.

Hmmm. Now there's gotta be a way we can exploit this to our advantage. (We being those of us who aren't them.)