I, For One, Do Not Welcome Our Dumb Robot Overlords

This from Paul Krugman's blog - follow link, etc., etc., etc.


I, For One, Do Not Welcome Our Dumb Robot Overlords

From the FT: stock in Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s company, jumps every time Anne Hathaway, the actress, gets a lot of media play.

Why? The claim is that it’s the fault of robotrading algorithms, which now account for most of the market, and which sometimes rely among other things on trends in news coverage.

That’s the kind of dumb mistake human traders wouldn’t make. Unfortunately, they’d make other kinds of dumb mistakes.