A fake AP tweet about White House explosions wiped $200B
Sean Gourley · Sean Gourley, Quid // Data Driven #25 // March 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital) · Mar 20, 2014 · at 7:33
Sean Gourley describes market instability caused by trading algorithms parsing headline news.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And a fake news report from AP Newswire comes out, says there's a bomb in the White House, and then this happens. The algorithms leave the market because they go, I don't really know what's going on here. I know something to do with the bomb happened, and probably I'm not trained for this, and the two hundred billion dollars is, is wiped.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sean Gourley
Gourley: Information propagation in networks is central to Russian military strategy
“And it's important to know the context of where information came from, because as information is seeded into the networks, it starts to propagate, and this becomes key attack vectors that are actually unfolding, and if you listen to some of the major Russian g…”
Gourley: Algorithms can briefly wipe $1 trillion from financial markets
“Sometimes the algorithms get together and decide collectively to wipe about a trillion dollars of market capitalization off the global financial markets only to return it about 15 minutes later with nothing really happening in the world around that.”
Sean Gourley: Wikipedia has a massive recall problem despite high precision
“And this is actually not just endemic to Andre, there's nothing particularly about him, but it's actually, Wikipedia has a massive recall problem. We think a lot about its precision, and we measure its precision, but its recall is actually pretty bad when it l…”
Gourley: Machine-generated content is becoming indistinguishable from true reality
“And it's important to do this because we're living in a world, which I would term, of the generation age, where it is increasingly cheap and easy to generate a reality that is almost indistinguishable from true reality by machines.”