Or someone got the report a few hours early, didn't want to be seen to jump the gun (insider trading, and all that) and kicked off a new trading strategy 400ms earlier than they intended...
It may well be that the 'early' trader knew they weren't the only one with early access to the data and intentionally set their trades to be a tiny bit early, to increase their chances of getting out ahead of the people who schedule their trades for just-after the scheduled announcement.
Which may well indicate a larger problem than one guy with a tip.
I mean, I know that traders are probably pretty anal about accurate clocks, but mistakes do happen.
Absolutely. I'm just saying there isn't much justification to assume it was a mere mistake.
Particularly given the trades that show up just after the report was released, but before a person could conceivably process them and initiate the relevant strategy.
That alone suggests gamesmanship, even if the "early" trader went earlier than he meant to.
Couldn't they be trading based on some natural language processing algorithm?
This would cut the advantage those hardwired trading machines have, that do tons of trades in few seconds or even milliseconds.
This should be one of the reforms against such things, in the interest of common folk investors.
So, for this example, that time was 10:30AM. The moment it hits that time, the reports get pushed out into the newswires and reported on-air.
This allows the reporters to digest the numbers and figure out how to report it.
Things like the State of the Union Address and candidate speeches are usually provided to the press beforehand so that they can package together a story. Next time you watch a major political speech, listen to the pundits prior to the speech. They will talk about all the things that the candidates are about to say.
With regards to economic numbers, there's very good reasons for them to do it this way (pre-released to media and embargoed). If it is not pre-released, reporters will need to take time to report the numbers which gives certain people an advantage.
For example, if you're monitoring Bloomberg for the CPI and the reporter is a slow typer, a person monitoring Reuters would have an advantage over you. Secondly, this forces a situation where reporters are in a hurry to get the numbers out which could potentially lead to errors. With these types of numbers, an error could have impact of billions of dollars in trades.
If you specialize in financial news losing numbers is a huge deal, you'll lose thousands of customers over it. And when those customers are often $1000/month subscribers it can easily mean a financial loss of tens of millions of dollars.
Within news organizations the information is typically restricted to 1-2 named individuals who have restrictions on trading. If they leak the information they can generally be criminally prosecuted.
In that case it was probably just a contractual issue between Google and their printer, to the wider market it would have been the same as if Google had accidentally released their numbers early.
(Actually even in the governments case it's still a contractual issue, it's just that governments have huge power by withdrawing early access rights)
If RR traded on those numbers they would have violated criminal insider trading law.