Dow Jones likes to kid around. He recently released a ‘fake news’ report claiming that Google wants to buy Apple. And bots absolutely bought it!
Dow Jones announced this morning that Google was in the process of acquiring Apple for a total of $9 billion. Apple’s stock was sky-rocketed for a brief moment up about $2 to $158 per one share. However, stock prices quickly returned back to normal.
Back in 2010, Larry Page and Steve Jobs commenced discussing the potential acquisition of Apple. Steve Jobs described the idea in his will, and according to his plan, the sale was set to be closed the next day. Google was supposed to get nine Apple shares for each Google share at a value of $9 billion. That really does sound crazy to humans, but bots actually fell for it.
Jones sent this statement to 9to5Mac who were the first to report this ‘drama.’ According to the company, the whole ordeal was a result of a technical error, and all misleading headlines would be taken off of the newswire.
Unfortunately, humans didn’t react quick enough. Algorithms have already done what they were supposed to do. It was irritating, but that’s normal because we realized a few moments later that our financial markets are being run by bots that seem as smart as children. Sentiment analysis, keyword search, trend identification and other ‘magic’ that was a factor throughout this ordeal really isn’t good enough to serve to its purpose when something like this happens.
We will present you with time series data from the moment the news went live, and you can easily see the trend of prices going up. You can also notice the price increase when the system finally realized what had been going on.
Dow Jones CEO, William Lewis released a statement following this event. ‘I take today’s inadvertent and erroneous publication of testing materials extremely seriously. While immediate corrective action has been taken, I have also ordered a review of news and technology processes in this area.’
