Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B

All I could say after reading was, "Holy Shit."

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB122100794359017593.html
The stock market opened Monday with no drop in UAL shares, but the UAL story began circulating widely via a posting by research firm Income Securities Advisors Inc. that was made available to users of Bloomberg L.P., the financial-news service widely watched on Wall Street. Shortly after a headline from the outdated report flashed across Bloomberg screens at about 10:45 a.m., UAL shares began a precipitous drop. Over the next 15 minutes, before Nasdaq halted trading, they dropped as low as $3.
It took fifteen minutes to send the stock from 12 to 3.