7 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] thread
How about we fix the broken, corrupt stock system by making everything trade like mutual funds.... only EOD. There's way more value being stolen or lost than created with the way the market has progressed. We'd all be better off if a "slow Wall St." movement took hold and eliminated all the skimmers out there that are stealing from the majority.
Reality: fake tweet causes scoreboard to indicate inaccurate value for several minutes. Nothing has been erased.
Subtitle should be: Realization that Tweet was Fake Creates $136B in Stock Market. In less than 5 minutes everything was back to normal.

The interesting question is whether the people panic selling were skittish human traders or twitter-based algorithms trying to get a jump on the headline.

Another linked article today indicates it was algorithmic trades, not human ones, and that the algorithms, which track tweets and social media, read it wrong -- they should have been buying, not selling.
> The interesting question is whether the people panic selling were skittish human traders or twitter-based algorithms trying to get a jump on the headline.

It's sometimes neither of those. A lot of stop-loss orders will have been triggered.

I doubt that is true. The overall market moved less than 1% and I don't think individual names moved much more than their normal daily trading ranges.
And in fact, at market close, the three major indexes were all up over a percent. Nothing got "erased" today.