The force of social media in trading

Recently al lot has been written about the force of social media and the possibility to hack the system. It happend in 2013 with a fake tweet about an attack on Obama and it happened again two weeks with a fake report about Twitter on fake bloomberg page. Twitter shares spiked 8%...

Using Twitter and other social media to filter news that might be important for trading is very smart if you assume that sentiment plays a big role in determining the price of a financial instrument. Twitter was probably not designed to be used in such a way and the founders of Twitter probably did not foresee the damage that could be done by using fake tweets. The same is true for all other news and social media.

But then the world has changed and so has trading. A lot of companies specialise in social media data (e.g mood-index).  The key is how they filter out the crap.

Looking at it from another perspective, if somebody sends a false tweet and markets move dramatically then maybe you want to act upon it. It is a trading opportunity.... Whether or not it is morally right or wrong is another question. So let's see how this story is going to develop in the next months or years. Probably regulators will to start to look more closely to this way of market abuse.