Veracity: The Most Important V in Big Data

One Glitch could lead to Financial Meltdown

Introduction

You may not know it, but there is a whole army of automated agents (bots) who are not attacking Web sites for DDoS or spreading malware, they are out to harvest information in order to make money for someone. They are continually mining the Web for trusted sources of information on companies, and then automatically analyse the information for sentiments. At one time the information was fed to human analysts, but now we have information overload, so increasingly automated software agents are making decisions on the stock market.

So if good things are said about a company, then an analyst will be advised to purchase their stock, and for bad things, they will bail out of the stock. Sometimes, too, the information-gathering agents can be programmed to automatically trade on the stock. So we get to the four V of Big Data …. veracity … and probably the most important one … the trustworthiness of the data.

And so it happened in 2016 where automated agents were primed to automatically sell the UK Pound and where they picked up bad news related to Brexit, and which led to a 10% drop in value. With the UK already feeling the strain on their currency — dropping to the 6th strongest economy in the world — it is not…