Shouldn’t believe what you read on Twatter….

Well, I tend to agree but in the world of the fast moving markets, everyone’s always trying to get an edge over the competition. The main way to do this is to make sure you have a live stream of information flowing in, all the large stock-brokerages have highly sophisticated programs that collaborate all the headlines together from over the web, twitter, google news, market watch etc. and put it into a constantly moving real-time live stream. It’s hard to explain but it looks something like a receipt being printed at a supermarket, every new news item is added to the end. The people pushing the buttons and shouting down the phones may well have not known the source when it came in on the news-wire, they’re job is to just inform the guys on the trading floor ASAP to give them the best chance of cutting their loses. If it wasn’t for the fact it’s all a giant information race, maybe the source could have been validated first.

There’s an old saying that if you so much as cough or sneeze in the NYSE it’s enough to cause a collapse, to say they’re sensitive to information is an understatement 😀