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My dad calls it the Financial deus-ex-machina. Every single financial newspaper does it. To be fair, they gotta report what happened with the market so the head

My dad calls it the Financial deus-ex-machina. Every single financial newspaper does it. To be fair, they gotta report what happened with the market so the headline has to capture something in addition to simply "DOW down 300 points". It is not useless, quite the contrary - you get an idea about facts + some context in less than a second of reading the headline. That's efficiency! No one is going to make correlation-is-not-causation arguments off of a morning headline. But it is funny: “DOW down 300 points as investors worry about Russian aggression” Next day: “DOW up 300 points as investors re-assess the Russian aggression” The financial world cracks me up. Dial in any earnings call to play the headwinds, tailwinds, double-down, as we continue to, can you add color to that?, etc bingo.

laurent92 5y ago
Apple’s stock app is awesome in that matter. “Why NASDAQ:_____ ticker is bound to go down in the next months” – the day after it gains 20% and doubles within the year…
tkinom 5y ago
Fog of war.
323 5y ago
I've seen it done even in the same day. Morning: DOW down 300 points because of Fed decision Evening: DOW up 300 points because of (same) Fed decision Context: most financial analysts at places like Bloomberg are literally some of the lowest paid employees. Most of them never traded any financial market in their entire life, which is quite short since they tend to be in their 20s.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Frontpage headlines are not written by interns. Those are analysts and developers you're talking about. I take the contrarian stance - these headlines are for people that are busy on Wall Street. They just need to know quickly what+context, not what+how. what+how is the holygrail and no one is stupid enough to even complain about these headlines in the Financial world. It is a tidbit that is extremely useful.
  - 323 5y ago
    There are plenty of stories from famous financial people who were initially hired as analysts at various banks/news agencies which go like this: so on my first day I was told "from today you cover Apple/Euro/gold market. But I don't know much about that. Doesn't matter, just give your best." And I'm not talking about the 80s, but even people doing this after 2007. You are right about what+context, buy you don't really need analysts for that, to tell you what market moved and what economic event happened before that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- redisman 5y ago
  I suspect those articles are written by “AI” / some script doing a find-replace.
  - vmception 5y ago
    I did that on a solo fintech project 8 years ago Don’t need AI, just string concatenation and an array of sentence types to randomly choose from when the article cron job starts Used bing’s API to search for certain macro market events and used stocktwits api to see which stocks moved the most and would make headlines and aggregate articles about those which it would post to twitter which would drive people to the no-login no-password app and subscription service (used ids based on in-app subscription ID or something else if using a browser) which was all populated with algorithmic trades lol turned it off because I didn't like updating all the APIs and compute instances as the services they relied on kept changing, but yeah self advertising self operating money printer
kkfx 5y ago
Beware that -300 a day, +300 the next one still means a -, a thing too many forget...
- ac29 5y ago
  Only in percent. In points, its net zero.
AnotherGoodName 5y ago
These are pretty much all automated. They take market movements and append the most relevant piece of news to that movement. If you track any stock closely you'll find your daily Motleyfool article "Why is XYZ stock is moving because of [most recent relevant news for that company]" The article is usually one paragraph stating the stock movement and a summary of the most recent news. You can get the same summary for different movements due to the automation here.
tobyjsullivan 5y ago
But they don't "have to" report it. It's become standard because it's free, guaranteed content. Finance and sports both follow the same model. Every trading day (or game, for sports) is guaranteed to have an article: Up or Down; Win, Loss or Tie. The content is filler as the articles' inclusion is justified regardless.

laurent92 5y ago

Apple’s stock app is awesome in that matter. “Why NASDAQ:_____ ticker is bound to go down in the next months” – the day after it gains 20% and doubles within the year…

tkinom 5y ago

Fog of war.

323 5y ago

I've seen it done even in the same day. Morning: DOW down 300 points because of Fed decision Evening: DOW up 300 points because of (same) Fed decision Context: most financial analysts at places like Bloomberg are literally some of the lowest paid employees. Most of them never traded any financial market in their entire life, which is quite short since they tend to be in their 20s.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Frontpage headlines are not written by interns. Those are analysts and developers you're talking about. I take the contrarian stance - these headlines are for people that are busy on Wall Street. They just need to know quickly what+context, not what+how. what+how is the holygrail and no one is stupid enough to even complain about these headlines in the Financial world. It is a tidbit that is extremely useful.
- 323 5y ago
  There are plenty of stories from famous financial people who were initially hired as analysts at various banks/news agencies which go like this: so on my first day I was told "from today you cover Apple/Euro/gold market. But I don't know much about that. Doesn't matter, just give your best." And I'm not talking about the 80s, but even people doing this after 2007. You are right about what+context, buy you don't really need analysts for that, to tell you what market moved and what economic event happened before that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
redisman 5y ago
I suspect those articles are written by “AI” / some script doing a find-replace.
- vmception 5y ago
  I did that on a solo fintech project 8 years ago Don’t need AI, just string concatenation and an array of sentence types to randomly choose from when the article cron job starts Used bing’s API to search for certain macro market events and used stocktwits api to see which stocks moved the most and would make headlines and aggregate articles about those which it would post to twitter which would drive people to the no-login no-password app and subscription service (used ids based on in-app subscription ID or something else if using a browser) which was all populated with algorithmic trades lol turned it off because I didn't like updating all the APIs and compute instances as the services they relied on kept changing, but yeah self advertising self operating money printer

kkfx 5y ago

Beware that -300 a day, +300 the next one still means a -, a thing too many forget...

ac29 5y ago
Only in percent. In points, its net zero.

AnotherGoodName 5y ago

These are pretty much all automated. They take market movements and append the most relevant piece of news to that movement. If you track any stock closely you'll find your daily Motleyfool article "Why is XYZ stock is moving because of [most recent relevant news for that company]" The article is usually one paragraph stating the stock movement and a summary of the most recent news. You can get the same summary for different movements due to the automation here.

tobyjsullivan 5y ago

But they don't "have to" report it. It's become standard because it's free, guaranteed content. Finance and sports both follow the same model. Every trading day (or game, for sports) is guaranteed to have an article: Up or Down; Win, Loss or Tie. The content is filler as the articles' inclusion is justified regardless.