Acting on very faint information to get a speed advantage is a thing. As long as you had an exit plan here, getting in early would have meant getting ahead despite being "wrong" in a macro sense. Don't think this is super sensational. Nonetheless, interesting piece and thanks for posting.
Title ought to be : In Sensational Blessing, Entire Market Moved Was Due To A CNBC Grammatical Mistake, and traders were very delighted.
Disagree, this would have been significant news if accurate. It would have raised tons of questions regarding China's attitude and America's strategy. This was not insignificant if it was correctly reported.
Might be discussing apples and oranges here or it is a language failure on my behalf. Was mainly pointing to the linked article's choice of words of "absurd fiasco" as being exaggerated. Totally agree that the CNBC article header would warrant huge movement if it had been correct. But one misspelled word meant the message was radically different, and there was no way to double check with the provided information. Granted, rapidly increasing price was observed and the unfortunate header parroted; these would likely have been seen by traders/algos as supportive of the original information despite being entirely redundant. My point being, from a trader perspective this was an entirely logical reaction and not a fiasco.
Why is this news? I suppose these reporters have never heard of machine-readable data feeding algos. Shit happens. "So basically Mnuchin said absolutely nothing new, and not only that, he did not provide any optimism that a deal was coming, but as we said earlier, was merely recapping what was already known. But what is most absurd about this entire incident is that nobody who was buying futures - and global stocks - actually listened to the Mnuchin clip in which he clearly used the past tense, and a second just as absurd outcome is that after stocks surged at 5am on the patently wrong headline meant to boost optimism in a deal..." This sort of thing goes on more than these peeps suspect.