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Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

A few automated trading algorithms would become marginally less effective. Some poorly written ones might crash or make a few million dollars worth of bad trades.

So, you know, there's that.

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I would assume Twitter would eventually find a reason in the terms of service, or add it, where that sort of thing isn't allowed. Therefore they could create their own poor implementation of the idea in a desperate attempt to generate some revenue.

I don't know why the parent post is being downvoted: trading using Twitter sentiment analysis is apparently a thing [1][2].

[1] http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading-strat...

[2] http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2011/TrusheimChakoumakosYendlu...

Edit: typo

> I don't know why the parent post is being downloaded

You may be browsing from localhost but the rest of us has to download this HTML...

there have even been a few instances shown on HN where these algorithms picked stuff up from the internet and have run with it, i.e. placed real trades. I remember at least 2 instances of this recently, once where the story was fake and once where an earnings forecast(i think) was released on a site but they had not published the URL so the assumption was no one would see it. The bot made a significant sum on the second example.

Many stories are deliberately faked to push the sentiment bots. Its a murky world.

Fascinating - especially if the loop get closed and trading algorithms can generate short-lived tweets (Markov chains?) to disrupt their opponents sentiment analysis.

The world also needs fewer* trading algorithms.

Well, really, the world doesn't need any. But I'm curious why you think the world would benefit from fewer.

Isn't there no real value added with HFT? Isn't the question then 'why don't we have fewer?'

Apparently the people doing it are gaining something from it, else as you note there would be less of it. I don't know whether it's value-creating or not as a whole; there are different types and classes of HFT operations and algorithms (including those that try to trade based on rumors and sentiment), and various arguments about who is or is not better off for their existence. Someone who wants to assert that it's harmful needs to have some kind of tally of all the benefits/profits and all the harm/losses that shows net value destruction, or at the very least a complete ethical argument. All we got was "the world needs less of this", which doesn't really do much to further anyone's understanding nor provide a digestible view on the matter.

HFT is generally touted to provide liquidity, at the least. Of course, there are some that argue against that.

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