The Handbook of News Analytics in Finance

2.1 PROLOGUE

XHAL checked its atomic clock. A few more hours and October 19, 2087 would be over—its vigil completed, it would indulge in some much-needed downtime, the anniversary of that fateful day in the stock markets a century ago finally done with. But for now, it was still busy. XHAL scanned the virtual message boards, looking for some information another computer might have posted, anything to alert it a nanosecond ahead of the other machines, so it may bail out in a flurry of trades without loss. Three trillion messages flashed by, time taken: 3 seconds—damn, the net was slow, but nothing, not a single hiccup in the calm information flow. The language algorithms worked well, processing everything, even filtering out the incessant spam posted by humans, whose noise trading no longer posed an impediment to instant market equilibrium.

It had been a long day, even for a day-trading news-analytical quantum computer of XHAL's caliber. No one had anticipated a stock market meltdown of the sort described in the history books, certainly not the computers that ran Earth, but then, the humans talked too much, spreading disinformation and worry, that the wisest of the machines always knew that it just could happen. That last remaining source of true randomness on the planet, the human race, still existed, and anything was possible. After all, if it were not for humans, history would always repeat itself.

XHAL¹ marveled at what the machines had done. They had transformed the world wide ...