Understanding Stock Market Manipulation 101 - 2012 Robot Generated Headlines - 0 views
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Brian Plain on 18 Feb 12At StockMarketFunding.com we've featured and highlighted how "High Frequency Trading" has forever changed the stock market. Ever since the Flash Crash the options markets have never been the same and we highlighted that throughout 2010 and 2011. Now we're seeing the dawn of a new and crude enemy that has existed, just in different forms. The "Fake News" story that makes a stock move up or down 3% to 15% in a matter of minutes. Of course in most cases there are no sources and news media insiders are paid or told of a "hot rumor" or "possible development" only to drive a stock price higher or lower. In this breaking story by ZeroHedge we can see the magnitude that "big business" has gone into to manipulte markets both international and domestic. It appears that while we were busy over the past month spreading the Greek pre- and post-bankruptcy balance sheet, and otherwise torturing Excel (something we urge other financial journalists to try once in a while - go ahead, it doesn't bite. In fact, it is almost as friendly as your favorite Powerpoint) our peer at such reputable financial publications as Forbes, and many others, were laying of carbon-based reporters and replacing them with... robots. As Mediabistro reports, "Forbes has joined a group of 30 publishers using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories. Here's more about the program, used in one corner of Forbes' website: ""Narrative Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer's voice, style and tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations."" In other words, with well over 70% of stock trading now done by robots, we have gotten to a point where robots write headlines and stories read, reacted to and traded