Fake tweets and rallies

An interesting day yesterday. The S&P had a nice big rally yesterday and now sits above 1575 in the pre-market trading:

Unfortunately for me, I only made a paltry twenty quid from this market yesterday, even though I was a buyer just before it rallied!  I wasn't around to manage my trade so I had it take my profit automatically when it hit the previous night's close. A profit is profit as they say - but ten times the profit wouldn't have been a hell of a lot nicer.

There was a bit of panic at one stage and we had a 'flash crash'. A fake tweet from The Associated Press' account which had been hacked sent the markets tumbling for a very short time. The tweet said that the White House had been attacked and that Obama was injured. Have a read of this, it's quite interesting:

Fake Tweet

The interesting thing here is that the tweet was picked up by the automatic trading bots. These bots now read news feed and are programmed to recognise good and bad news. A few years ago, I was amazed when I heard that bots could effectively 'read' the news and trade it but there's since been a few cases where it has gone haywire and in some ways, it's a little refreshing to know that computers are not yet as advanced so that they can replace humans.

On Betfair, I had a couple of wins and a small loss in the place markets resulting in an overall profit of 26 quid. Nothing to get excited about but it's still early days on this particular strategy.