Tribune: Single Visit To Web Site Led to Drop in UAL Stock

[oz_mark]

You think our papers are dodgy. Look what Google can do, when picked up by a reporter that then doesn't check on what Google has picked up

Tribune: Single Visit To Web Site Led to Drop in UAL Stock - WSJ.com

Tribune Co. said the chain of events that caused a 2002 article about United Airlines' then-bankruptcy filing to appear, leading to a plunge in the parent company's shares Monday, began with a single late-night visit to a newspaper Web site.

That single visit at a low-traffic period caused the old Chicago Tribune article to appear in a box labeled "Popular Stories Business: Most Viewed" on the Web site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel at about 1 a.m. EDT Sunday.

About 30 minutes later, a reader looking for information on canceled flights, clicked on the link to the old story in that box, and 52 seconds later, Google Inc.'s automated search agent Googlebot visited the Web site and found the story.

Soon after that, Google provided a link to the old story on Google News and by Monday the article became more widely distributed to users of Bloomberg LP, the financial-news service widely watched on Wall Street.

Interesting article in the New York Times about it as well
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/a-stock-killer-fueled-by-algorithm-after-algorithm/?hp

 

[JohnK]

The internet can be scary sometimes.

 

[NYCguy]

As a mentor of mine once told me, "as a general rule, any relationship between the overall condition of a company and the price of that company's stock is completely co-incidental".