Matt Levine, Columnist

Stock Markets Had a Rough Second Yesterday

Presumably some people do hang big arty stock price charts on their walls, right?

May 14, 2014 at 8:34 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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One criticism of high-frequency trading that you hear a lot is that it destabilizes markets, because all the computers trading with each other don't have the common sense famously possessed by stock exchange floor traders, and so they sometimes do dumb stuff like sell stock for a penny or buy it for $99,999.99, and then later when you yell at them they just point to their algorithms and shrug.

A modest version of that happened in a bunch of stocks yesterday. AOL, for instance, pictured above, just trucked along, then WHOOM, then went right back to trucking along. MoneyBeat has some intraday charts -- of AOL, Marathon Petroleum, Lorillard, Canadian Natural Resources, Nabors Industries and, awkwardly Nasdaq OMX -- and is it weird that I want to get large prints and hang them on my wall? They're kind of beautiful, although I guess "my kindergartner could have drawn that" would be a valid criticism. They have a distinctly scribbled look.