Agreed. This submission is titled "Tesla Stockholders Can't Take a Joke". Although technically true, the misleading part is the stockholders being talked about are algorithms, not people.
We should be worrying not that Tesla released a joke PR that moved the price, but that we live in such an apparently unstable financial world where in the quest for milliseconds, HFT algorithms create non-negligable price swings in response to completely de-contextualized information.
Five years ago this wouldn't have been a blip on the radar. If the rules have changed, so be it, but we should recognize that it's the system we've built that has changed the rules. We can yell 'securities fraud' at Tesla's PR department, but if so, we should recognize it's fraud because Tesla was releasing information that confused the dominant traders, which are now algorithms. If that's fraud, do we now have a fiduciary duty towards the algorithms?
More troubling, if the system we've built is so unstable around just PR releases, what's going to happen next time there's a serious problematic signal?
> Although technically true, the misleading part is the stockholders being talked about are algorithms, not people.
That was on purpose though. The title was meant to be deliberately misleading to highlight the fact that what we think of as "stockholders" is wrong: increasingly, the "stockholder" is an algorithm.
We should be worrying not that Tesla released a joke PR that moved the price, but that we live in such an apparently unstable financial world where in the quest for milliseconds, HFT algorithms create non-negligable price swings in response to completely de-contextualized information.
Five years ago this wouldn't have been a blip on the radar. If the rules have changed, so be it, but we should recognize that it's the system we've built that has changed the rules. We can yell 'securities fraud' at Tesla's PR department, but if so, we should recognize it's fraud because Tesla was releasing information that confused the dominant traders, which are now algorithms. If that's fraud, do we now have a fiduciary duty towards the algorithms?
More troubling, if the system we've built is so unstable around just PR releases, what's going to happen next time there's a serious problematic signal?