Black Monday - fake news edition.
Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#62One nice thing about SEC-regulated markets - unlike the various cryptocurrency markets - is that it's possible for trades to be rolled back if they are "clearly erroneous". That isn't perfect - if the data is only a little off, it might not be possible to get a trade rolled back - but it tends to limit how much havoc is called. https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2009/2009-215.htm (My understanding is that trades can also…
Cryptocurrency trading usually happens on an exchange and the exchange almost certainly won't make any on chain transactions every single time a trade occurs, they will just swap the balances around inside their own internal systems. The on chain transactions will only happen when a user withdraws their currancy from the exchange. So trades certainly can be very easily rolled back by exchanges up until the point that one party withdraws from the exchange.
And during major instability and crashes it's not unusual to hear that the exchanges disabled withdrawals temporarily. I assume this is at leaat partly until they have chance to asses if any action is necessary.
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#63As some have suggested, Nasdaq is confirming that this was test data that got propagated to third party aggregators.
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you ever use a taxi? Because if you do, you are putting your life into the hands of someone who could be a much worse driver than you. Instead of putting your life in the hands of a terrible taxi driver, would you put it in the hands of software that is on average better than a taxi driver? You are in a taxi, so you don't get to choose to drive it yourself.
Not gp, but I would personally expect a taxi driver to be better than me seeing the amount of time the diver spends on the road. The driver wouldn't be profitable otherwise. That said, I also mirror gp in that any self-driving car must be at least better than myself for me to trust it. I imagine that's a sentiment shared by many people.
I agree this is the natural bar, but don't know how to reconcile it with the average person believing they are a better driver than average (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority)
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except these weren't real prices. Buy orders would not have been triggered.
It seems like the price was trying to be set to 123.45 -- there are some discrepancies on different sites; not really clear whether any trades took place in little or no volume after hours, or purely feed error.
As far as I can tell, it happened after the markets closed. Even so, my brokerage had the correct prices the entire time.
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#66One nice thing about SEC-regulated markets - unlike the various cryptocurrency markets - is that it's possible for trades to be rolled back if they are "clearly erroneous". That isn't perfect - if the data is only a little off, it might not be possible to get a trade rolled back - but it tends to limit how much havoc is called. https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2009/2009-215.htm (My understanding is that trades can also…
It's not a property of a regulated market, it's a property of a specific centralized system. Nothing prevents SEC from "regulating" a system where such rollback is impossible, and nothing prevents centralized cryptocurrency exchanges from rolling back transactions that haven't made it into blockchain. There can even be non-immutable blockchains, which rollback mistakes, such as Ethereum.
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#67> The problem may have originated with data services providing Google and Yahoo their financial information I'm sure Google and Yahoo pay a small fortune for this data so I'm wondering if they are aware of the situation and holding these data services companies accountable or not.I'm also sure these data companies sell their data beyond information sites to investment firms & others that make buy/sell decisions based…
I'm fairly certain they're aware of the problem :)
And yes, I bet this is going to lead to some interesting meetings between them and the data providers.
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#68This story isn't emphasizing an important point: the stock price of many tech companies - amazon, google, Microsoft - were pegged to exactly $123.46 for multiple hours. This is likely 123.456 rounded to 2 decimals. To me this smells like a software testing bug or hack, rather than "stocks crashing"
I saw it pegged at 123.47
Stocks have two prices. I guess this would be reflected in test data.
Re: Finance sites erroneously show Amazon, Apple, other stocks crashing
#69This story isn't emphasizing an important point: the stock price of many tech companies - amazon, google, Microsoft - were pegged to exactly $123.46 for multiple hours. This is likely 123.456 rounded to 2 decimals. To me this smells like a software testing bug or hack, rather than "stocks crashing"
The NYSE did exactly the same f*ckup in 2014. And as I would expect will happen this time, the NYSE did not care because it is a bank holiday in the US, but it is not in the rest of the world, and I saw many people complaining on forums that their brokers automatically closed their positions or made big margin calls.
So this is a pretty bad mistake.