I think Hal of 2001 fame is messing with us again.
Point: Â The message ‘Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,’ was tweeted from the Associated Press news agency, causing panic to some of their near 2 million followers. […]
In a graph capturing traders’ apparent panic, the DOW Jones Industrial average took a straight dive plunging from about 14,700 to around 14,570 before gradually shooting back up in a three-minute roller coaster.Â
Some traders blamed automatic electronic trading for the sharp fall and recovery and not human reaction to the report.
‘No human believed the story. Only the computers react to something that serious disseminated in such a way. I bought some stock well and did not sell into it. Humans win,’ Rick Fier, director of equity trading at Conifer Securities LLC in New York, overseeing $8 billion in assets, told Bloomberg.
Counterpoint: Â On the one hand, it illustrated the efficiency of the markets, said Henry Hu, a law professor at the University of Texas and former top Securities and Exchange Commission official.
Just so long as you step away from the computer and override it, or is the theory that “things will work themselves out”. Â (Ie: Â market recovered pretty quickly from this glitch, right?)