Good Bots, Bad Bots

May 11, 2010 at 10:18 pm | Posted in wall street | 5 Comments

Over the next few days I’ll be introducing you to some software that makes decisions about money and trading.

Unlike Cliff’s benign bots that use our group cyber consciousness (the web) to project how the human family will be faring in the future, some bots are designed to emulate, or even exploit, human investment choices.  They aren’t all good bots.

Some of those bad bots spun out of control last Thursday.  It put real fear in most professional investors who faced the chasm that opened up in the stock market. For a few minutes, it looked like there might not be a bottom to it.

That ten-minute panic convinced some citizens of our fair country that the markets are a rigged game, rigged to take their hard-earned savings.

The more extreme version of the story is how the bots “milk” us every day or sheer us every so often to take our wool.

We sheep had better hope that the price of wool stays high enough that the farmer doesn’t decide to sell us to the butcher.

In the mean time, I’m hitting the road at 5 AM each morning and coming back after dark, seeing and participating in the purest market I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Brimfield, Massachusetts is a tiny town that gives itself over three times a year to thousands of antique and collectible dealers, and a hundred thousand (some estimate a quarter of a million) potential buyers.

Think Flea Market on steroids for four days at a time.

Saw the perfect bird’s eye maple dresser today.  I don’t need any more furniture, but I may visit the dresser again tomorrow.

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