Google story mistakenly prompts $1 billion price fall in United Airlines stock!!

Now this one is hard to believe! On Monday 8th Sept, 2008, automated programs were allowed to wipe more than $1 billion from a company’s value unchecked.

When a website ran a story which merely referenced an old Google news article from 2002 about United Airlines financial problems, the hits to Google boosted the old story’s ranking and it appeared high up in Google’s rankings. This would normally be no problem, but because it appeared highly ranked, the story was then reported like a NEW story by a newspaper website – and this prompted the automated trading programs to dump United Airlines shares in a panic, even though the airline was no longer experiencing any money problems. It is estimated that $1.3 billion was wiped from the company’s value, for no real reason whatsoever!

Source: slashdot , TimesOnline

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Tags: airliine, market, money, share, stocks

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Business and Finance, Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.