The Financial Times has had an error on its “Market Data” page for 18 months
mako.cc
mako.cc
Many people will have seen that error and simply not cared.
And the FT is also owned by the Nikkei now, who likely have folks who could immediately spot small mistakes relating to companies in the Nikkei 225.
So this slipping through suggests there are possibly more minor errors elsewhere.
Even if it’s not used seriously it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Even if it’s nostalgic or an old guy who checked the paper for 50yrs and today still likes checking on a couple of his pet stocks once in while on paper.
This was the thesis of the Emotional Design book (the follow up to famous tea kettle design book) that engineers and amateur designers often over focus purely on function and ignore emotion - they overvalue the most rational approach. For ex: programmers always want the least amount of clicks to do x, when an extra step with an info box and a button might help ease worries and anxieties and smooth the UX.
Often there is value in the pure visceral experience, sometimes emotion, or nostalgia, or pure beauty of the design. This is often what creates a great product that people become religious about. So such things can’t be dismissed out of hand simply because the value cant be reduced to going from point A to B faster/efficiently/cheaper.
What is being dismissed out of hand?
The concepts of emotional design and the accuracy of data on a financial website seem rather unrelated?
The fact FT messed up by automating it and not doing basic QA is a signal but it’s not the whole story. A few extra pages for nostalgia reasons, style, and a few hardcore fans is hardly a big burden on a product. But who knows. Maybe it is useless.
You don't want your QA to break every time a new data source is added
You can't check to see something you don't know is not there without losing a ton of flexibility
The investigation on wirecard was great though.
Generally more words means more information.
You’d probably get fired for giving minimal information.
AND I can choose what to read and what to skip, which can’t be done with streaming video. There’s no BREAKING NEWS headlines. There’s no distracting blonde anchor. And if the news is 15 hours old, I don’t care.
There’s nothing in the news that needs my attention within 15 hours after it breaks, except a nuclear missile heading my way.
If I need the news right away, right now, then I read it online.
(Which I 99% agree with, there are some rare cases when you want old snapshots that haven't been subsequently revised, but does that mean we need to keep printing tables in every copy of every day's paper?)
Assuming the goal is to buy and hold for 10+ years, recent changes should be irrelevant.
Most investors do better not focussing on stock prices at all.
It doesn’t solve the vast majority of dark and non-dark patterns that the smartest people in the world are employing to keep you on the website.
Not sure it's worth writing an entire article about - bugs in financial data are extremely common. When I worked in equities whenever tehre was a corporate action (split, reverse split, ticker change, merger, dividend etc) in some stock in which we had a position it was always of concern whether the market data providers would make a mistake somehow. Since we had a lot of positions you would tend to get at least one of these errors every few days. Typical mistake would be like, stocks in London typically are actually in GBp (pence) in the marketdata feeds but would often need to be translated to or from GBP (pounds) for some systems. You might see a split or reverse split and the marketdata provider briefly publishing the price off by a factor of 100 for this reason. Now imagine you hold some kind of option or autocallable derivative or whatever. According to the marketdata this should now exercise. However everyone knows this happens and takes care of it. Actually in some contracts we would occasionally see the terms state something like "The price will be the return value of EQ VOD LN HP<GO> on bloomberg at X time" meaning that if bloomberg publishes a mistake you have to run with it.
I had similar experiences when supporting the ref data platform.
On one system holding ETF and Index data we had several thousand products each holding between 10 and a thousand components (eg DJI through Russel 3K). On each product and each component of it there are multiple major fields that need to be correct (price, quantity, multipliers, etc). Any mistake throws off the risk systems and trading in those products (eg basket trading an index, delta hedging, etc)
Millions of data points, and single data errors caused big trading errors.
The data itself could be wrong from the actual providers too, taking debugging into a whole extra level of complexity.
And binary floating point price and volume representation is still rife in the industry, leading to all kinds of pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_World_of_Puzzles#Contest...
> In the past, the magazine also ran an occasional hidden contest, in which part of the challenge was to find the concealed puzzle with instructions on how to enter (e.g. "You have found the hidden contest. To enter, send us a chain of paper clips."). Until November 2002, readers were also challenged to find the fake advertisement among the legitimate ones (the last one was for the Red Card, a credit card used to pay off credit cards).
But I do agree that page is only worth it for the nostalgia.
I regular buy the Sunday times in the UK to see what they list the best 5 year mortgage rate as. To the author this looks like a page of numbers that no one reads but that one I care about enough to spend £4.50 on a Sunday times whenever I'm in the UK.
It's often true that there's "a better way to read this on your iPad" but like so many things it's often only "better" if you value your time at nothing.
However, to answer the question asked in the article; a not insignificant capital mass of share owners and investors are older than 60 and watch stocks and trades at most day to day, more likely weekly or monthly (sans any sudden news re: MyStock!!).. and "of those people that buy a paper copy of the FT" a goodly chunk have habits that include reading through a paper and glancing at their stocks of interest (alongside tracking general financial industry news).
Probably some of these readers noticed the dupe, most would have written it off as of no importance.
Doing this is a benign way to see if anyone is sourcing data from you.
Now... Is that what is happening here? Beats me.
First of all, I think everyone is willing to acknowledge that no one reads the market data page line by line from top to bottom. People go to this in order to look up the value of particular stocks and commodities. So anyone who went to this page to look up a different stock (or several different stocks) would never even see this error. Yet they would be benefiting from the FT market data page.
Furthermore, public companies are complicated. For instance: there are two separate ticker symbols: GOOG and GOOGL. On any given day they will have market prices that are slightly different but fairly close to each other. Is this because the Financial Times has accidentally listed this ticker symbol twice? No! It is because Google has chosen to list two different classes of stock on the market. I do not know enough to be sure that listing "Nippon T&T" and "Nippon TT" separately is incorrect -- perhaps one is a subsidiary of the other which, for technical reasons, has the same stock value. I am willing to believe if this author knows otherwise and wants to report this error to the Financial Times. But it is certainly not the case that anyone who had seen this discrepancy would necessarily have reported it, so the continuation of the error is not evidence that no one ever reads this page.
Whatever the reason I suspect anyone reading that page wouldn't care - there's no incorrect data published after all (as the headline implies)
The merge case seems unlikely, as no price would be published for the previous symbol. The multiple share class case seems also unlikely, as that is very seldomly used in Japan.
Most likely the FT tried to create an index of the top 500 worldwide market caps, and got a primary listing of NTT on TSE duped with an ADR or dual listing in EU/US.
They also publish stuff like that. It doesn’t seem to be a very well proofed page. And generally seems to confirm that the whole thing is pretty automated so I can see how this happens.
The author is correct though: what a waste of space. I’d actually forgotten that closing prices used to be printed in the paper — I wonder when that stopped?
Funny how a newspaper and its website both have things called "pages".
If I were reading this paper and these pages subconsciously signaled something to me, I doubt it would be “serious financial paper”. More likely it would be “run by clueless dinosaurs”.