Twitter-mad twits trade 14 million shares in BANKRUPT zombie biz US regulators have had to change the stock symbol of bankrupt electronics firm Tweeter after some overexcited investors mistook the shares for soon-to-IPO microblogging website Twitter's stocks, sending them surging by 750 per cent. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority assigned Tweeter Home Entertainment Group the new …
Question : Was there actually any, living and breathing, skin and flesh trader involved or was this an example of an algorithm getting a little excited again ?
It goes to show just how fragile the whole stock market really is. Decisions are not being made on fact or anything tangible, they are simply being made on movements.....
The stock market is basically the biggest computer game in the world... and it's being run by computers.
Scary, it's very, very, scary......
Americans. That is all you need to say.
I still occasionally get eBay order from those morons where they complain that 'you charged my card extra' because they don't understand what £ GBP means, and have great difficulty in comprehending that "we don't accept foreign currency" might include $ USD.....
Well, yes, but that only explains the part involved with arbitrage. It doesn't explain why P&P are so much higher than necessary, nor why the money only seems to buy the services of a snail with gout should you be so foolish as to make the deal, even when not running the gauntlet of eBay.
Fair disclosure: I'm a bibliophilic ex-pat in a book-crazy workforce who gets frequent visits from exasperated colleagues asking for an explanation of why such-and-such a book costs more than the already high cover price to ship, and takes months to make the journey.
I *tell* 'em it's gouging, that they'll pay for air mail and the parcel will travel by tramp steamer, and I've had it happen to me and to just not use UK sources who are fundamentally untrustworthy when it comes to this sort of thing (to tar with but a single brush, but it seems to be the order of the day) but they keep going back to the well and using me as a proxy when they need to yell about it.
Amercians, eh?
Personally, I look for US sources for UK books whenever possible, and I never use eBay for them any more because I know what I'm getting is what it says on the box with Amazon and I have a proper course for redress if it isn't so when I get the box open.
Did people learn nothing from watching SCOX become SCOXQ?
(Not that I am alleging any impropriety at Tweeter. I have no idea why they went bust. It was probably an honest business that just failed. Most bankruptcies are. All I mean is that you would think that people would know what a bankrupt American stock with no obvious hope of resurfacing looks like. It has a Q on the end.)
Doesn't this imply that a lot of middlemen (who should have known better from the Q) have made money brokering trades as the stock prices went up and down again?
Sure. But that's precisely what execution-only means. Brokers don't offer advice about specific stocks, they simply carry out the instructions given. Most of of them are at pains to make this doubly clear to you whenever you open an account. Doing anything else opens them up to all sorts of claims regarding duff advice and mis-selling.
Exactly the problem with Capitalism that Marx discussed in Das Kapital.
Somehow money is being created out of thin air by putting a value on something that does not exist and then selling parts of that non existent commodity for more than you paid for them. The inevitable result is a small number of folks do very very well and the majority suffer. The world today is a perfect illustration.
AC because I work in Financial Services keeping the systems running for the fat cats. Or in other parlance, bringing the system down from the inside :-)
I hope they don't pay you too much :):):)
I'm not sure that Marx specifically discussed the problem of consumers overpaying for something because they mistook it for something else. This is no more significant than someone mistaking lamb for beef.
If you are claiming that equity 'does not exist' then you are just talking nonsense. Equity is no more unreal than the money in your bank account or the pint you owe your mate. And certainly Marx claimed no such thing.
Your saying there is no problem with mistaking lamb for beef? An open and transparent market and all that mean much then? How can a market function without the correct information? As a hint, it does not. It devolves into a random occurrence of value shifting, and in the same case, shifting wealth.
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