I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy!
30 / 09 / 2008
It’s a tantalizing daydream for horse-track bettors, bookmakers and Wall Street traders: the thud of tomorrow’s newspaper landing on the doorstep today.
While no one has figured out how to make that happen, Wall Street’s computer scientists and linguists keep trying to find quicker ways to react to the news by creating ever-more complicated algorithms, [...]
It’s a tantalizing daydream for horse-track bettors, bookmakers and Wall Street traders: the thud of tomorrow’s newspaper landing on the doorstep today.
While no one has figured out how to make that happen, Wall Street’s computer scientists and linguists keep trying to find quicker ways to react to the news by creating ever-more complicated algorithms, the mathematical formulas that execute stock trades automatically based on such criteria as headlines and news stories. The idea is to buy or sell at a faster clip than the guy or computer at a rival trading desk.
All this can go horribly wrong, as United Airlines learned last week when a six-year-old story about the company’s 2002 bankruptcy filing gained new life on the Internet, triggering a cascade of stock sales.
In a matter of about 12 minutes more than $1 billion in stock-market value evaporated…
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30 / 09 / 2008 | |
