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April 23, 2013

Twitter as a Dangerous News Source

False rumors of an explosion at the White House causes Dow to drop 150 points. AP says its twitter account was hacked!

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Posted by gerardvanderleun at April 23, 2013 10:26 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

That's not so much a problem with twitter as twits in the stock market.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at April 23, 2013 11:46 AM

I'd think that the news should rally stocks, not hurt them, seeing the anti biz stance of the group of idiots running things from there.

Posted by: Dedwzyl at April 23, 2013 1:18 PM

I had that thought to but that's not what happened. Maybe soon. But the street hates uncertainty.

Posted by: vanderleun at April 23, 2013 1:36 PM

Well the prevailing wisdom right now is people panicked at the idea of "President Biden" but who knows what those idiots were thinking, if they thought at all.

A more likely scenario is that everyone in wall street is waiting for the total collapse of government and economy and figured that would be the trigger, so they wanted to get out first.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at April 23, 2013 2:12 PM

This happened because high frequency trading algorithims (hft) are programmed to search news feeds for certain trigger words and phrases, and then direct buy or sell programs for hedge funds and the like. These HFT units are highly leveraged, and move huge trades in seconds, far faster than human traders, and are not bount by common sense.
Germany has taken steps to outlaw this.

Posted by: Flannelputz at April 26, 2013 7:50 PM

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