For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world’s mightiest stock market to tremble. No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks eventually unloading $134-billion worth.
Except most investors were not humans. They were computers, selling on autopilot beyond the control of humans, like a scene from a sci-fi horror film.
“Before you could blink, it was over,” said Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading and an outspoken critic of high-speed computerised trading. “With people, you wouldn’t have this type of reaction.”
For decades, computers have been sorting through data and news to help investment funds decide whether to buy or sell. But that’s old school. Now ‘algorithmic’ trading programs sift through data, news, even tweets, and execute trades by themselves in fractions of a second, without slowpoke humans getting in the way. More than half of stock trading every day is done this way.
Markets quickly recovered after Tuesday’s plunge. But the incident rattled traders and highlighted the danger of handing control to the machines. It also raised questions about whether regulators should be doing more to monitor the relationship between social media and the markets.
Irene Aldridge, a consultant to hedge funds on algorithmic programs, said many of the trading systems just count the number of positive and negative words, without any filter. She wants regulators to do more but believes that glitches and plunges may be inevitable.
“You can’t ban Twitter,” said Aldridge, author of “High-Frequency Trading,” a guide to algorithmic trading.
Just how exactly the trading unfolded on Tuesday is still a bit of a mystery.
In Wall Street’s insanely fast trading world, humans holding back for even a second could have signalled to computers that buyers were drying up and that prices could fall, and so the computers should sell fast. Others, like Saluzzi, think computers may have sold on the tweet itself. That’s possible because computer trading programs are increasingly written to read, and react to, news from social media outlets like Twitter.
Rich Brown, head of Elektron Analytics, a Thomson-Reuters unit that sells news feeds that computers can read, said that the words ‘explosions’ or ‘Obama’ alone wouldn’t have triggered selling. But add ‘White House,’ and it’s a combination even the slowest computer couldn’t miss.
Mr. Brown said his service doesn’t include Twitter in its feeds because there’s too much useless ‘noise’ in the deluge of tweets and, given the 140-character limit to tweets, often too little context. Before the fake tweet appeared on Tuesday, it looked like any other good day on Wall Street. Unexpectedly strong earnings reports sent stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average up one per cent to 14,697 with three hours to go in the trading day.
Then, at 1.08 p.m. EDT, a tweet appeared on the hacked AP Twitter account stating that two explosions at the White House had injured President Barack Obama. Stocks immediately started falling and tumbled for two minutes.
The Dow dropped from 14,697 to 14,554, losing 143 points, or 1 per cent. In the frenzied selling, oil prices dropped, gold rose, the dollar rallied and the price of Treasury notes, seen by many investors as a hiding spot, shot higher, briefly knocking yields to their lowest level of the year.
The AP quickly announced that its account had been hijacked and the report was false. The Dow began to climb again, recovering all its losses by 1.18 p.m. That was ten minutes after the fake tweet, according to FactSet, a financial data provider.
A group called the Syrian Electronic Army said it was responsible for the hack. But the claim has not been corroborated. The FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission said they had opened investigations into the incident. Some Wall Street pros were surprised that a single tweet could move markets so much.
