[travisp]

Even though this is Wired, this is typical of financial reporting: to take a single day of price movements and write whole stories about them, completely ignoring larger price movements or alternative explanations. I've even seen news articles about stock market movements changed after the price swung from negative to positive in the same day... but the article kept the explanation for the price movement essentially the same! My guess is that this Wired story would have found a way to be written regardless of what the stock price did. But, getting to say that it "dove 7%" makes for good headlines (even if soared 8% just the day before, meaning that it just "dove" back to its original price).

While I don't think Zynga is a great company to invest in, its stock price is very volatile, which probably makes for good frequent attention grabbing headlines. Sure, this news was part of the reason the stock price was down, but apparently market price setters still think the company is 13% more valuable than it was 30 days ago.

[hosay123]

One of the early innovations of Bloomberg was to totally automate certain classes of news story, driven entirely by data. As you can see from spending any length of time browsing Google Finance, the number of this class of stories in the present day is absolutely huge, from a wide variety of 'news' outlets.

"Top movers! Miners down 0.00001% as fears grow over $calendar->getNextECBAnnouncement()"

What's more terrifying is that Google Finance even syndicates these articles, and that people trade off of them - "informed" traders, buying and selling based on articles that are quite literally generated from sampling noise

[JumpCrisscross]

Do you have a reference for this? As someone with a Bloomberg terminal I've found their wire service completely free of that kind of junk more typical of tech journalism, MarketWatch, or StockTwits.

[hosay123]

Bloomberg mentions it in his autobiography (Bloomberg by Bloomberg) while Taleb mentions encountering similar stories on his Bloomberg terminal in Fooled by Randomness.

[rubyrescue]

I know a lot of Bloomberg reporters and a bureau chief for a pretty big market and they definitely do not work this way. For starters, the people relying on the terminals (and paying a lot of money for them) are savvier than that.

[hosay123]

> certain classes of

As commented below, Bloomberg mentions it in his autobiography.