Have we just seen the latest way to make a ton of cash? I know that this was a freakish chain of events, but if you wanted make a tidy profit, put out a news item like this on a company; watch the stock nosedive and then go in and buy at the bottom. Once the "error" is found to have no substance, the price goes back up and you can sell back at at a profit. Nice day's work. It would also allow someone buy a fair size piece of the company if they were thinking of a takeover. At a certain point, they need to declare their intentions, but buying cheap right up to that threshold would leqave extra cash for gaining additional shares later.

You could also just short the stock.

And financial interests aside, this may inspire merry pranksters to see just how much of an impact they can make, just for the thrill of it. It's for these reasons and others that I'm not terribly sympathetic to those who lost money because of this incident. The market is increasingly filled with panicky gamblers passing themselves off as investors, and they go fight-or-flight at the least shift in the wind. Heck, maybe a few more of these incidents will help to cull the herd!

i think you have it backwards. Had they cancelled the trades then there would be no reason for someone to to try to do this maliciously since they could expect the trades to be cancelled that time too. This will be a huge problem if all it takes for google news to pick up a story is for it to be "most viewed" on some newspaper. Any botnet could easily make a story be most viewed with the intention of crashing a stock. And unlike shorting a stock as you suggest, buying low after a stock has crashed has much less risk and requires less money.

It's interesting that they haven't reported how the article became most viewed. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it was some botnet purposely trying to raise the article in order to crash the stock. To really make that work you probably would need a bit of luck like having it get on Bloomberg, but given how easy it would be to do if you owned a botnet it would be well worth it.

Well, you can give it a shot, and if the trades get cancelled, the perpatrator is none the worst for wear. The idea that Google would bring an old news story to the top of a search highlights an issue I have always had with the serach engine. Many times I have found that the top searches fell to old stories or websites. There should be better options to look at newer content, particularly in the area of news.