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Report – Algorithms Probably Caused a Flash Crash of British Pound

MIT Technology Review – Jamie Condliffe, October 7, 2016: “Overnight, the British pound dropped by 6 percent, to $1.13. Analysts are pointing the finger at an increasingly familiar financial scapegoat: the algorithm. Though the crash hasn’t yet been definitively linked to algorithmic trading, the Economist argues that the speed of last night’s drop points at software gone haywire. Financial algorithms—or algos to those in the trade—can be prone to high-speed selling spirals, where a trigger point causes one piece of software to sell, driving down prices, which in turn activates the trigger points of another program, and so on, until things go badly wrong…”

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