The limits of automated news bots

Yesterday perfectly illustrated that technical glitches can occur on stock exchanges. Berkshire Hathaway A shares were erroneously shown to have fallen 99.97% to $185.10 at the beginning of the trading session, compared to $627,400 at Friday’s close, resulting in a trading halt at 9:50 a.m. Eastern time. Automated news bots, lacking the ability to judge the quality of the information they disseminate, propagated the erroneous headline on Bloomberg following the event. Fortunately, as long-time holders of the stock, none in our portfolio management team at ECP suffered a heart attack at his Bloomberg terminal. This incident underscores the importance of never blindly trusting anything published by AI or automated news bots.