
Dow Jones technical error spreads fake news story of Google acquiring Apple - panarky
https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/10/dow-jones-hacked-google-acquiring-apple/
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chollida1
Since about 2013, most, all?, completely automated trading systems have
ingested some form of news headline as well as sentiment on it.

2-3 times year a story like this comes across the news wire and its a good
test to see who blindly follows headlines, vs who actually uses the headline
and sentiment news as just one of many signals that are mixed together to
create a trading signal.

Of course since most algos also have a momentum component, it becomes hard to
see who has poor risk management vs who is just following the momentum and
piling on:(

I remember two cases, one was about the FED raising rates by 2% and another
was that a plane had flown into the whitehouse that was published by the AP.

Rule #1 of machine learning

\- No data is clean, no matter how much you pay for the data, there is always
noise.

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panarky
_Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34AM
ET and 9:36AM ET. Due to a technical error, the headlines were published._

Technical errors don't manufacture false stories from thin air.

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icedchai
Sounds like test data (fake stories) made it's way into the wrong environment.
This is easy enough to do. _That_ was the technical error.

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twoodfin
I wonder where on the spectrum from metaphysical impossibility to metaphysical
certainty the accurate version of this headline is.

Sure, AAPL’s enterprise value is north of $800B, and GOOGL’s market cap is
~$680B. But I bet stranger things have happened in capital markets, albeit not
at this scale.

If Alphabet’s board were hell-bent on acquiring Apple, could they get the
leverage to do it from anyone short of a national government? (Putting aside
the obvious antitrust concerns.)

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paxy
People always talk about the perils of algorithmic trading and how easy bots
are to fool, but in this case they all basically ignored the news. That feels
pretty sophisticated (and scary) to me.

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dang
Url changed from [https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16453226/dow-jones-
fake-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16453226/dow-jones-fake-
headlines-google-acquiring-apple-technical-error), which points to this, but
(in an apparent dick move) doesn't link to it.

