Re:A web-reading bot made millions on the options market
by IkmoIkmo on Sunday April 26, 2015 @06:10AM
(#9441218)
Yeah you remember a few weeks ago the Tesla stock moved $2 when Tesla announced its april fools new product? That was completely automated.
It may not even have had to discern a new product announcement or launch. It may have just looked at twitter volume mentioning Tesla which doubled that day, and did sentiment analysis (much easier, which showed the communication that day was very positive), and purchased a bit of stock based on that. Who knows.
Re:A web-reading bot made millions on the options market
by novaleaf on Sunday April 26, 2015 @08:20AM
(#9441505)
The irony is that likely those bots actually did make money. It's the other bots that later "jumped on the bandwagon" (and perhaps a couple humans) that probably lost big.
Re:A web-reading bot made millions on the options market
by xyzzy123 on Sunday April 26, 2015 @01:24AM
(#9440647)
Oh yup, how come they're an analytics provider and not a fund? ;-p
Re:A web-reading bot made millions on the options market
by maffydub on Sunday April 26, 2015 @05:06AM
(#9441095)
I don't know anything about the provider in question, but funds might integrate multiple data sources (e.g. the described tweet analysis, last financial results, competing companies) - in other words, a lot more than what an analytics provider needs to do.
Maybe the analytics provider wants to focus on doing one thing and (hopefully) doing it well?
Re:A web-reading bot made millions on the options market
by usefulcat on Sunday April 26, 2015 @03:11PM
(#9442896)
The point is that any time you see a trading tool being offered publicly you can reasonably assume that it's actual usefulness is pretty limited, at least by itself. Otherwise, they'd be using it internally to trade and make more money.
This is indeed occurring on a daily basis. A number of funds trade automatically based on fully automated analysis of the news wire and other sources.
I believe most use in house analytics but there are 3rd party solutions:
http://www.ravenpack.com/
I think people outside the industry don't appreciate the depth and breath of automatic trading that is going on. Understandable given that it's in the interest of insiders to stay out of the spotlight, and the public mostly only sees the HFT headlines.