You know how it is, something sells off sharply, spreads widen … panic ensues …

And then the comment appears "Oh, its algo selling"

Which is good 'cause we all need a laugh at this stage.

Anyways, I was reading this over the weekend, and nodding along in agreement. Its from Matt Levine at Bloomberg. If you read nothing else, read Matt Levine.

He talks about how markets go up but there is a sell off:

sometimes a lot of people need to sell a lot of assets all at once, and when that happens, we "just say the market went down," because that is what it means for the market to go down. (What else could it mean?)

But you program that same model into a computer, and the computer panics and sells, and all of a sudden everything is the computer's fault! When people herd and panic and otherwise embarrass themselves, we don't blink, because we are people too and we're used to it.

But when computers are programmed to distill human behavior and do it faster and more rigorously, and they herd and panic and embarrass themselves, it's weird and scary and alienating (for the humans). "What are those computers doing," we ask, even though the answer is pretty much "what we'd be doing, only faster."

The computers are people, my friends.

Here is a link for more

Yep. Please remember, computers are executing instructions. Fast and efficiently. But only executing instructions … from a human.

There is more on this, that I'll save for another post when I need another rant. But its at the link above if you want a head start.

Its just a movie people, not real

(oh, and a book)