the news discovery portion fascinates me. I know that they are sucking in all of Twitter, as much of Facebook as they can, tons of RSS, etc. recently there was

the news discovery portion fascinates me. I know that they are sucking in all of Twitter, as much of Facebook as they can, tons of RSS, etc. recently there was a case where the actress anne hathaway was trending on twitter and it caused the bots to short berkshire hathaway stock, which dipped ~6% arms race going on which will only open more opportunities to exploit these situations. feeding in all this public news data and automating trades makes a mockery of SEC insider trading regulation (because it is so easy to hide - the computer did it!) I would love to read a full feature of what goes on inside GS et al but I know that the quants aren't allowed to speak about it and the companies do not discuss it. We get drip fed small pieces of info but nobody has really assembled a complete picture of what is going on. I do know that the investment banks are some of the largest customers for most of the large enterprise IT co's (IBM, Sun, Microsoft, EMC, etc.). The IB's are also hiring mathematicians and compsci graduates like crazy - the tech these guys are producing must be cutting edge and at a very very large scale