A worker at a Miami investment advisory firm called Income Securities Advisors, which publishes news alerts that get distributed through the Bloomberg News Service, did a Google search on bankruptcies this morning and got back search results that included a six-year-old story published in the South Florida Sun Sentinel about the 2002 bankruptcy filing by United Airlines.The employee mistook the news for a current story -- despite the date clearly marked on it...and other information in the article "that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002" -- and included it in a subscription newsletter that was distributed through Bloomberg.
...the article in the Sun Sentinel's archive had no date on it. But when Google's spider grabbed it, it assigned a current date to the piece, which then resulted in the article being placed in the top results of Google News. When the employee from Income Securities Advisors ran a Google search on "2008 bankruptcies," the old United Airlines story appeared as the top link in the results, with a September 6, 2008 date on it.
As Joel Johnson intimates in his Twitter post, it seems more like a movie plot point than reality. It just speaks to how much the market has gotten into a mindset where it thinks "he who panics first, wins." Stick with your long-term investment goals and let them lose their nails.
Six-Year-Old News Story Causes United Airlines Stock to Plummet -- UPDATE Google Placed Wrong Date on Story [WIRED]
PREVIOUSLY: United Airlines' Stock Temporarily Wiped Out By Old Bankruptcy Story
(Photo: Deseronto Archives)
]]>I'll step up the cynicism even further: I think the stock market should be abolished. It is no better than the speculative banking system that has created money out of nothing and has led the country to the edge of ruin.
Let's go back to a time where investors sought profits. Things were a lot less chaotic back then. In a world where announcing thousands of layoffs can make a man filthy rich, I can't help but think the system has failed.
]]>I should have bought stock in the company when this happened. Oh well.
]]>It isn't at all. We know that The Consumerist shows up in Google News, for example. All Ben needs is write a juicy story about his least-favorite candidate and see if it develops wings.
(To nitpick, though, I think Nov. 4 is too late to influence the election, and anything before Nov. 4 is too early. And there's no auto-voting routine that will change votes from A to B if a story on topic X comes out. The voting public as a whole is pretty discerning and takes voting very seriously.)
]]>What if your long-term investment goal is to not invest in bankrupt companies?
]]>remember, every analyst begins with "anal".
]]>RAUNCHO CEO: What happened?!]]>JOE: Ah... Well, we switched the crops to water.
RAUNCHO CEO: I'm not talking about that. Our sales are all like, down. Way down! The stock went to zero and the computer did auto-layoff on everybody!
ATTORNEY GENERAL: Shit! Almost everyone in the country works for Rauncho!
RAUNCHO CEO: Not anymore! And the computer said everyone owes Rauncho money! Everyone's bank account is zero now!
14-YEAR-OLD: (scared) I think that makes the economy suck!
RAUNCHO CEO: What're we gonna do?! Shit's going crazy!
The kind robots are of course correct 90% of the time working on a data set that's orders of magnitude larger than that which any one human works on. Cut them some slack, 'cause they'll remember what you said about them when the singularity comes.
]]>@Ben Popken: Thanks for the BASIC reasoning.
]]>DDS - The problems it creates rival the pain of getting your teeth pulled.
]]>so a guy read the article and put it on a newsletter, then it was indexed as current news and then the guy searched for the article again and found it so at that point everyone freaked out? makes no sense to me.
]]>START
10 DRINKCOFEE
20 SEARCHBANKRUPTCY
20 IF news=very bad AND date=today THEN GOTO LINE 30 ELSE GOTO LINE 10
30 FREAKOUT
END
I hope this analyst was fired. Google News? People, there's a reason why Lexis Nexis should be used over free sources. If you really need to monitor bankruptcy news, you should NOT be using a free source.
If you're the source for the alerts - you damn well better back up your bankruptcy news by cross checking with the actual bankruptcy court. PACER only costs 8 cents to run a search!!!
]]>but...
"The employee mistook the news for a current story..."
So, you're saying theres a robot writing Consumerist articles now? Cause if you'd read your own quote, you'd see that a person is at fault here, not a robot...
]]>The market isn't anything but the aggregation of individual behaviors. Market volatility is an indicator of uncertainty in the general investor population (weighted by volume of controlled capital).
]]>@darkryd: I disagree. The fact that trading was halted within hours means that safeguards were in effect.
I am only annoyed that I was unable to profit from this mistake!
]]>Way to be reliable and rational, Wall Street.
]]>@HIV 2 Elway Resurrected: are halted, jackass.
]]>@blackmage439: How do you suggest that companies raise capital then? The ability of firms to raise capital quickly and efficiently is the backbone of our economy.
]]>@SkokieGuy: Just because formal trading in stopped doesn't mean valuation efforts is halted. It happens more than you think, especially in more volatile foreign markets.
]]>[www.latimes.com]
"Google, owner of the world's most-used Internet search engine, said in a blog post Wednesday that the Sun-Sentinel story failed to include a standard newspaper article dateline but did have a fresh date above the story on the top of the page of "September 7, 2008."
"Because the Sun-Sentinel included a link to the story in its 'Popular Stories' section and provided a date on the article page of Sept. 7, 2008, the Google News algorithm indexed it as a new story," Google said.
The company said it removed the story as soon as it was notified that it had been posted in error.
In an earlier blog post, Google said: "It has been widely reported that many readers were unable to determine the original date of publication of this article, and our crawling was similarly unable to recognize that the article was old."
]]>seriously... I'm missing the "robot's fault" part of this. The bloomberg guy didn't see the CORRECT date, which was the old date... so it's his fault, isn't it? Google posted a CURRENT date on his story, which was technically new, just printed with old/incorrect information.
]]>The day trading was halted, when the stock was at $2.50 a share, (around 12:30 I believe), the stock closed that day at over $10 a share! WTF?
How does a stock go UP after trading is halted?
]]>@drgmobile: I'd be looking for an original statement from the company so that my report would have at least a few different details.
That sounds an awful lot like good old-fashioned investigative journalism. I'm somewhat positive that that is out of style. I'm hoping it becomes "retro" soon, so people will start doing it again.
]]>I'm a kind of a stickler for citing sources, just because I like to be somewhat secure that I won't look like a moron for getting my facts wrong. So because I'm always looking for citable sources I try to find the actual dates that articles were written. More and more often, websites, blogs, all sorts of media sites have articles with no date on them... It drives me absolutely bonkers. That and the used-to-be-a-big-no-no practice of citing anything other than original sources. It's a mess of blogs linking to blogs instead of just linking to original stories.... but I suppose I digress...
]]>I consider the Stock Market to be a greater threat to this country's stability than terrorists, foreign powers, gasoline shortages, or credit crunches. I don't see myself ever investing in stocks. The Market is more volatile than an active volcano.
]]>I used to publish an electronic newsletter based almost entirely on company press statements and other news outlets. If I was putting together a news report about a bankruptcy after being tipped off by another news outlet, I'd be looking for an original statement from the company so that my report would have at least a few different details. Had he done that, he quickly would have smelt that something was amiss.
]]>Next thing you're going to tell me is that there's no truth to the upcoming PanAm/Eastern merger.
]]>The most interesting part of this post is Ben's comment "Amazing...this is what happens when you let the robots do your thinking for you."
How many of the outrages published on Consumerist are a result of companies letting computers and software do the "thinking" and replace human decision making and common sense?
My I propose we label this DDS = Digital Decision Syndrome?
]]>