So we’re forever hearing on the news of some twitter or facebook page getting hacked now and again…
But today’s hacking of the Associated Press caused a panic sale on Wall Street.
At around 18:09 BST the AP posted on twitter that 2 explosions had gone off at the White House. What followed in the next 30 seconds was one of the most rapid sell off’s in history. Of course, once the news got out it was all a hoax, shares bounced back up. But this does go to show the fragility of the market and why it’s so important this sort of hacking is cracked down on.
http://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=983582
You can imagine this could have been very costly had multiple networks been hacked simultaneously.
By: Matt-100 - 23rd April 2013 at 19:54
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 😀
By: Bob - 23rd April 2013 at 19:23
Shouldn’t believe what you read on Twatter….
By: Matt-100 - 23rd April 2013 at 19:00
That’s assuming you can re-buy them in time before they go back up again. We’re talking fractions of a second.
By: David Burke - 23rd April 2013 at 18:55
Is it costly or is it just people dumping shares and then rebuying them at the bottom of the dip?
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April 23, 2013 at 6:35 pm