Tesla's April Fool's Joke Spoofs Market Algorithms 163
Okian Warrior writes Yesterday, Tesla's twitter feed and blog announced the new "W" Model. Meaning "Watch" (as in "wristwatch"), the announcement Included a photo of a watch spouting a cumbersome "Big Ben" glued to the face and including this text: "This incredible new device from Tesla doesn't just tell the time, it also tells the date. What's more, it is infinitely adjustable, able to tell the time no matter where you are on Earth. Japan, Timbuktu, California, anywhere! This will change your life. Reality as you know it will never be the same." Clearly, this was an April fool's joke as anyone who reads more than just the headline would immediately guess. The problem is that Bloomberg's fast response team did not. The algos, on massive volume, spiked TSLA stock higher by nearly 1%.
Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Interesting)
A 1% move on an individual stock is not that much, is this really a big problem?
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Funny)
When you're trading in volume by the millisecond for pennies, a $2 swing for an April Fools joke would be a pretty big deal I'd think.
Excuse me while I play the worlds smallest violin for the financial addicts on Wall Street.
You want to gamble by the millisecond, learn to live with winning and losing at that same rate.
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I don't get why you were modded funny. Your comment deserved to be modded up, but I didn't really find it that funny.
Dunno. Neither did I.
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for users of fast trading algorithms getting burned... yay?
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Interesting)
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1% in a day is more than enough for a pump and dump!
Most stocks fluctuate more than 1% in a day. Right now, Tesla is up 2% on their opening.
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Depends on how you define 'most'. Most over the counter and listed stocks, probably. Most listed stocks, maybe. The majority of the capitalization, not likely.
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Informative)
Most stocks fluctuate more than 1% in a day.
Outside of a market crisis, they sure as fuck do not.
Yes they do. Besides Tesla, other companies that fluctuated more than 1% today include Microsoft, General Motors, Exxon, etc. Small companies tend to fluctuate even more. Perhaps you are thinking of the overall market average, which tends to fluctuate far less, because the individual companies generally do not move in unison.
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One day of data = anecdote
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, think about it ... say you could pretty much push the value of any stock by 1% just by having your idiot boxes start actively trading.
If you're the brokerage house, you can make a lot of money by planning to cause the price to briefly blip and then make money on the differences.
A brokerage house shouldn't be able to change the price of a stock like that.
Doing it based on a joke tells me just how damned broken that method of trading is. And since all of the trading houses have these algorithms, it's not unprecedented for them to set off a chain reaction.
Basically a bunch of self-serving greedy bastards can materially impact the stock market any time they like .. even if they don't intend to. All to try to rip off money from the market
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how stock markets work - the price is set by a bunch of greedy bastards. If you're also a greedy bastard (or you're the original one) you might lose money trying to get in on these things. If you're not, you don't really care. Unless you make a point of selling on the spike and taking advantage of the greedy bastards.
Of course someone throwing enough money around can change the value of a stock. That's the point of a stock market. This story just says bad things about Bloomberg. You should think twice about buying into anything they manage.
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. That high frequency trading has resulted in a single point of failure is the real story here. If bloomberg announced this to a bunch of humans, some would buy without thinking, a smaller amount would buy cause they're stupid but most would just laugh at bloomberg's mistake. Computers don't get jokes. Every time a previously unknown trigger occurs there is a chance a feedback loop will blow something up.
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Anybody can push the price of a stock up 1%, you don't have to be a brokerage house. All you have to do is place a buy limit at 1% above the current stock price. But then you would have just spent $101 on a share of stock that you could have bought for $100. That's kind of what happened here - computers that thought the joke was a real product were willing to spend $101 on a stock that everyone else know was still just $100. So the point is that they didn't make money off this, they lost money off this. Whi
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Informative)
Check out the actual bump [zerohedge.com].
Anecdotal of course, but it sure seems like the announcement caused a massive spike in trading.
Also note that TSLA [google.com] is up $4 over yesterday's close, so that's a total of 3%.
This is not nothing, given the scope of effort they made (a simple blog post and twitter announcement).
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anecdotal of course, but it sure seems like the announcement caused a massive spike in trading.
Once the algos learn to discount press releases on April 1st, that's when companies start scheduling their bad news for that date.
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Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:4, Insightful)
Investors are not hurt. Speculators are. I'm good with that.
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You don't know the difference between an investor and speculator do you?
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I'll take that as a no.
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Ever hear of a bond, a commodity, a long term investor... When an auto-trade algorithm hits an action point... it has no impact on any of them. This only potentially impacts high risk investors and by definition they've opt'd in to the risk and have the burn coming.
Anyone else either isn't speculating by gambling in the stock market or is at least trading on longer scales of time that erase momentary blips in a stock price like this.
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1% increase a day is almost 38x by year's end, fwiw.
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Might want to do the math on that. It's already April so you're losing 3 months of compounding.
Re:Wow, a whole 1%? (Score:5, Informative)
380 days? That's not how exponential functions work. They clearly assumed 365 days: 1.01^365 = 37.78 (an extra 0.6 day would hit 38 exactly). With 380 days you'd be at 43.87, or with only 260 trading days that would be 13.29x
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It goes a long way to putting the lie to any claims of the market being anything but a casino driven by random fluctuations.
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It goes a long way to putting the lie to any claims of the market being anything but a casino driven by random fluctuations.
Because a small fluctuation on a single stock is damning evidence for the market casino?
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When it's in response to an obvious joke, yes. Look at the volume and tell me that's not a lot of so-called level headed serious investors acting like someone yelled BOO in a henhouse.
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When it's in response to an obvious joke, yes. Look at the volume and tell me that's not a lot of so-called level headed serious investors acting like someone yelled BOO in a henhouse.
Again, the price only shifted 1%. That indicates to me that this casino attitude was not widespread.
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Again as well, supposed serious grown-ups investing other people's money.
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You are explicitly speaking of "algos trading back and forth". That would naturally generate a lot of low relevance volume.
I see no evidence that any of these market games is at all harmful to outsiders. Sure, someone probably lost some fingers and toes in this goof, but so what? I find it r
Holy crap ... (Score:5, Interesting)
So the stock market is being actively manipulated by idiots?
As usual, these people are just parasites on the financial system looking to skim off money before everyone else has a chance.
High frequency trading is essentially skimming off the top for yourself without having done ANYTHING other than having a faster connection.
I hope these clowns bankrupt themselves one day with their stupidity.
You don't get how Wall Street works (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope these clowns bankrupt themselves one day with their stupidity.
No, based off what happened last time, they don't go bankrupt. They don't go to jail.
Everyone else's retirement funds take a huge hit and lose value, but assholes^H^H^H^H business leaders like this are too important to fail.
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Your retirement portfolio is only affected if it's on the wrong side of one of their trades. Index long-term my friend and fuggetaboutit.
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And, for anybody who hasn't thought of this ... don't take random financial advice from the internet, talk to a professional.
There are quite a few scenarios in which indexed funds took a complete bath with the downturn in oil.
Indexing is no magic bullet either, just a bet that in the long term things go up and keep doing so.
Re:You don't get how Wall Street works (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? The professionals' performance is pretty much the same as random.
Realize that investment carries risk and some kinds carry more risk than others.
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Believing that stocks are supposed to mirror some sort of intrinsic underlying value is just wrong-headed. Nothing has intrinsic value. The price of a stock certificate, like the price of a diamond, is based on supply & demand.
And like a diamond, people have varying reasons to own it, which might not have anything to do with any practical function of the thing. Which isn't to say that practical applications don't effect the price.
Supply & demand--it's a seemingly simple concept but in reality the va
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[of comment subject] You don't get how Wall Street works
Wall Street doesn't "work". It never has. There is no "work" being done by anyone involved solely with Wall Street activities. None of that activity produces actual goods or services. A laundromat contributes more to the real USA economy than all the mutual funds ever have, or ever will.
The main problem with capitalism today is that it is a religion that has been completely subverted by heretical money changers from the original visions of John Locke and others.
The most exciting and beneficial economic a
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None of that activity produces actual goods or services.
I suppose it depends on how you define "services". But most people would consider the capital markets [investopedia.com] a service:
Capital markets are vital to the functioning of an economy, since capital is a critical component for generating economic output. Capital markets include primary markets, where new stock and bond issues are sold to investors, and secondary markets, which trade existing securities.
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You are missing the point.
The tremendous success of FOSS-- including its adoption by major corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Ubuntu-- proves that capital markets are not necessary for a vibrant economy. The growing success of crowd-sourced projects are another and more direct challenge to the myths that capital markets are based on. Like a mud and wattle palace of an ancient Middle Eastern empire, capitalism, and capital markets, are crumbling. There has not been a "devine right of kings" for centu
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Just saw a remarkable first hand report of people driving donkey carts in the outback of Timbuktu while using cell phones to broker deals on their goods while still hours away from the market.
Good example of capitalism and free enterprise at it's finest. Not sure what it has to do with Wall Street or FOSS though.
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Wall Street doesn't "work". It never has. There is no "work" being done by anyone involved solely with Wall Street activities. None of that activity produces actual goods or services. A laundromat contributes more to the real USA economy than all the mutual funds ever have, or ever will.
It certainly works when taking a good company idea and getting investment needed for that company to grow and build more things. It also works pretty well when you want to mitigate risks associated with changes in things like raw material costs or certain business scenarios.
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[Wall Street] certainly works when taking a good company idea and getting investment needed for that company to grow and build more things. It also works pretty well when you want to mitigate risks associated with changes in things like raw material costs or certain business scenarios.
Crowd-sourcing is better.
FOSS is very good.
Before these and similar developments in SOHO bookkeeping and financial planning, capitalism was necessary. But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so, so too do recent technological developments show the age of the capitalist is drawing to a close. Capital markets work with convenient fictions that we no longer need.
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Crowd-sourcing is better.
FOSS is very good.
Neither one is even remotely a replacement for traditional capital markets and crowd-sourcing is a capitalist system.
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Crowdsourcing and open source have nothing to do with capitalism, either for or against. They are orthogonal.
But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so
That's hilarious, you're using an example of one product of capitalism (like QuickBooks) supplanting another product of capitalism (like small accountancy firms) to show that capitalism is obsolete. Do you see why that makes no sense? That is how capitalism is supposed to work. Your example shows that capitalism is thriving and continues to show resiliency and ability to adapt over time.
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So the stock market is being actively manipulated by idiots?
As usual, these people are just parasites on the financial system looking to skim off money before everyone else has a chance.
High frequency trading is essentially skimming off the top for yourself without having done ANYTHING other than having a faster connection.
I hope these clowns bankrupt themselves one day with their stupidity.
this already happened, in 2008. except it didn't bankrupt the bankers, it bankrupted the rest of the U.S. and major parts of the globe.
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it bankrupted the rest of the U.S.
Amazingly, I didn't go bankrupt, and neither did anyone I know, and nor did any business that I know of.
IOW, stop regurgitating manifestly false FUD.
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it bankrupted the rest of the U.S.
Amazingly, I didn't go bankrupt, and neither did anyone I know, and nor did any business that I know of.
IOW, stop regurgitating manifestly false FUD.
sigh. can you take a little joke? sarcasm? hyperbole?
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Try looking beyond the gates sometime.
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Analogy, overly pedantic kid in middle school who starts every sentence with "Well technically..."
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Losing $40 Billion on paper within a few weeks tends to ...
tends to indicate to me that the company was too leveraged.
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That wasn't high frequency trading, it was bad loans. Bad loans to people who wanted to buy houses. So the greedy children who just had to have that house they couldn't afford caused an economic crash. The clowns just let them do it.
The unfortunate thing about the whole scenario is that the clowns got bailed out so everyone who invested their money with them didn't get burned. If some idiot loses your money it's supposed to hurt so that you don't give that same idiot more money to play with.
Re:Holy crap ... (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't only bad loans.
It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment, and then hoodwinked the rest of the world into buying it. It was a scam on a massive scale.
Essentially Wall Street and the financial industry made HUGE mistakes in who they loaned money to, and the lied to everybody else as they pawned off the debt.
It was a fucking pyramid scheme, ran by con artists, and then foisted off onto everybody else.
Had it only been bad loans, the idiots who made those loans would have been the ones to get hurt. But this was basically kiting checks and outright falsifying documents.
This wasn't caused by people who bought houses they couldn't afford. This was theft by the financial industry to cover their own stupid losses.
The scam could only have worked because the ratings agencies are complete whores who don't actually do anything meaningful other than "if you pay us, we'll say anything you want".
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I'm sorry, but national reserve banks are not children and are responsible for managing their own risk. See also how the German banks are managing the Greek deadbeats.
One good thing happened, even idiots don't trust big accounting firms, ratings agencies or government sponsored loan clearinghouses anymore .
The real bubble is in Treasuries. That one will be UGLY. (Unless the Euro or Pound pops first.)
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Sounds like bad loans to me. It most definitely was people buying houses they couldn't afford, although you can make the argument the the average person is too dumb to know if they can afford a house or not so the size of the loan they can take out should be limited.
The banks that issued those loans played some games, but other banks and insurance companies bought it. They should have known better. If I tell you I've got a AAA bridge to sell, do you buy it without doing a little checking? Either way, ev
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A point of clarification, technically it wasn't just people who couldn't afford the houses they bought, it was people who chose not to afford the houses they bought. It's perfectly legal to refinance and max out your LTV, use the cash to buy a new car and pay off credit cards, then walk away. I mean, depending on where you live, if your mortgage is a non-recourse loan then the bank gets the house back and your credit score is trashed for a few years, and that's about it.
I almost bought a house from such a p
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It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment
No no. I wish people were more familiar with statistics. It should be a required math course in high school, rather than geometry.
Look, if I package up 100 subprime loans paying 12% interest with an expected delinquency rate of 10% (which is really bad, historically), I can do the math and figure out a 99% confidence interval on making *some* amount of money. I can turn around and say, I bought these 100 loans paying 12%, and I'm writing a derivative that pays 1% interest but I'm 99% confident that it WILL
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It was bad loans that financially naive people accepted on the knowingly bad advice of mortgage brokers who needed fodder to fraudulently sell off as AAA investments.
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Someone so naive they can't read and understand a fair lending disclosure should have a trustee manage their money.
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Who says it wasn't one of 20 sign here's somewhere in the middle. Did I mention these brokers were fraudsters?
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Mortgages are not for children. They should have read what they signed. Their own fault.
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Good for you! Pin a rose on your nose! A lot of otherwise reasonable people got sucked in to this by trusting that the person who is supposed to be constrained by ethics was actually constrained by ethics.
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How were these reasonable people hurt? They traded their credit scores for a few years of living in subsidized housing (not government subsidized but investor subsidized), they cashed out their equity based on ridiculously inflated appraisals, they bought new cars and paid off their student loans, etc.
Many of these "victims" were not "otherwise reasonable people." They saw dollar signs and correctly concluded that they could pull a fast one, and only the bank would get hurt. How many? I don't know. It's not
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What equity? They were under water. That means negative equity. It means sell the house and you still owe money.
What they lost is a chance to buy a starter home that they would actually build equity in and actually be able to eventually pay off (or trade up).
There were some speculators that did quite well during the bubble, but that wasn't for a first home. They got HUGE loans and flipped the properties near their inflated peak value.
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You are trying too hard to squeeze everything into a fairy tail morality.
The people that bought on the peak were the same population that bought two years before. One was not evil and one was not a victim.
They were both a bunch of optimists. Those that agreed to loans they knew (or should have known) they could not afford have only themselves to blame.
Those that bought before the peak, took out equity as cash then lost the house were in fact winners and came out ahead on the deal. The fact they might
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Where did I call the house flippers evil? They did nothing wrong. It's the loan flippers I have an issue with.
You seem pretty eager to hang a halo on the banker's horns for some reason. They're the ones who talked first time buyers into the bad loans and then sold them off like a hot potato to someone else who sliced and diced it and mashed it back together with other loans, slipped a fiver under the table to get that glop stamped AAA, and finally sold it again to experienced professionals in finance who A
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True some of them should never have qualified. Your issue is with the feds, they wrote the underwriting standards.
Social engineering fail. You know this, much as you are in denial.
The fact remains that anybody who went into these loans unaware should have a trustee appointed to manage their money. They aren't equipped to deal in the real world.
There are only two possibilities; they were party to the fraud or they are incompetent to manage their own money. Assume everything they claim is true, they ju
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Blame the victim all you want and look at the bankers with rose colored glasses all you want, but you are in fantasy land.
Don't try blaming the feds either. Would you blame the feds if they don't have a law against sticking your head under a running lawn mower? If they don't specifically say you shouldn't wedge a fire hose into your mouth and turn the hydrant on full?
While we're at it, it's also not the fault of the Easter Bunny, Santa, or Cupid. It's not because their parents didn't buy them a pony.
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I hope these clowns bankrupt themselves one day with their stupidity.
Sadly, all that would mean is that you'll be 'asked' to tighten your belt so their constant stream of hookers and blow can continue through a massive bailout.
These people are truly the scum of the Earth.
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If it's a bad bet, then they lose YOUR capital.
What's your problem?
FTFY
lesson learned (Score:2)
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On Wall Street? Of course they're taking a bump [urbandictionary.com].
Wait, we are talking about cocaine, right?
April Fools (Score:2)
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It's Zero Hedge. Every article is submitted by Tyler Durden.
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LOL, I assumed you were joking until I checked back on the site.
That's awesome, I may have to add this to my daily sites.
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Good thought but a bunch of outlets are reporting that TSLA volume did indeed shoot up by almost a factor of 20 yesterday (and I checked for myself as well). So no, this story doesn't mean we're fooled, it means we're fucked.
Quants don't get a joke?!? (Score:3)
The hell you say!
Maybe it was the Autopilot "Ticket Avoidance Mode" (Score:2)
I woulder if it could have been due to the "Ticket Avoidance Mode" [treehugger.com] in the upcoming software update? Video here [twimg.com].
The joke's on us. (Score:5, Insightful)
While these thieves on the other end are high on opium (OPM= other people's money) rolling high, taking insane risks, and all the profits and bonuses are theirs. If they make a loss, they are too big to fail and our taxes will bail them out. If they blatantly lie, cheat and commit felonies, they are too big to jail too.
Realize this. The. joke. is. on. us. They are laughing all the way to the bank (which they own probably).
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That had nothing to do with the article, but I'm glad you were able to get that off your chest!
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That's way too simplistic. If there's a loss, of course they bear it. Bailouts happen when the loss is so large it's going to overwhelm the particular bank plus other big companies connected to them (such as insurers like AIG).
While I agree that's not fair, it's also not as bad as you're pretending.
Meanwhile down at the track... (Score:3)
Unless you have 20 hours weekly to become an expert in an investment sector, the only winner when a small investor buys and sells stocks is the bookie. Er broker. Managed funds are better. Or was it diamonds. I can't remember which.
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Not diamonds. Diamond prices are whatever deBeers says they are. ... Synthetic diamonds, now, possibly. But their prices are lower. If you want comodities, then iron is fairly good, but storage prices are high. (Notice I didn't say comodity futures?) A few decades ago I thought that monocrystalline silicon would be a good commodity to invest in, but I'm not sure that would still be a good long-term choice.
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Game Set Match. I love it when the point is missed.
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20 hours a week?? Maybe if you want to do day trading. Then you should expect to put in those kind of hours, and you'll probably lose anyway.
It's sad because this myth that investing is a rigged game really hurts a lot of naive people who are susceptible to being scared. Maybe some poor guy reads your comment and says "Gee willickers, I better cash out that 529 account for my son's college and put it under my mattress. Can't trust them darn bankers!" Yay for you, you screwed someone.
I honestly can't underst
Not Big Ben (Score:2)
mortgages and financial crisis of 2007-2008 (Score:3)
I see a number of posts blaming the financial crisis of 2007-2008 on the sale of bad mortgages.
If you are not familiar with the terms listed below, then you should not attempt to discuss the financial crisis of 2007-2008 because you would be wrong.
If you are reading an article about the financial crisis, or listening to someone discuss the financial crisis, and you do not hear these terms then you should assume they are either ignorant or lying.
hypothecation
140% rehypothecation rule
credit default swap (CDS)
collateralized debt obligation (CDO)
synthetic CDO
repurchase agreement (especially internal repo and repo 105)
Tautology (Score:2)
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What are you, some sort of caveman from the 20th century?
We're much more enlightened and self-reliant here in the 21st century. Employees are responsible for taking their own money and invest in the only game in town.
The fact that the game is designed to be rigged six ways from Sunday is beside the matter.
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You can't seriously propose that companies pay money into employee pensions as they contractually agreed to, now can you?
Hah, forget companies, if you can get the government to fully fund their pension promises you'd get the Nobel prize. I mean for God's sake look at the hoops people jump through to argue that the USPS is paying too much into their retirement funds. They come up with bogus arguments like "They are paying for employees who aren't born yet." Ummmmm nooooo, they are paying an extra catch-up amount because it's underfunded to begin with. The catch-up amount is equivalent to them paying the normal amount for addit
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Elton John, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
I weep for this generation.
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Wait, you say that in response to an APK post, and a misattributed quote is the part you're worried about?!
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Hey, Dude, go easy on that stuff.
At best you are confusing a derivative with the original. Otherwise your mind seems to have cast Elton John as the fifth Beetle, which while an intriguing fantasy in some ways, is sort of at right angles to ordinary reality.
So please ease off before your head 'splodes and messes up the interior decorating.