Can algos trade Trump’s tweets? Absolutely. Maybe.

Donald Trump sent the tweet heard ’round the defense industry Tuesday morning at exactly 35 seconds after 8:52 a.m. ET, blasting Boeing and suggesting he wanted to cancel the company’s contract for the new Air Force One aircraft.

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One second went by. Then two. No reaction on Wall Street.

It wasn’t until a full ten seconds later that Boeing stock began trading down on the news in the pre-market hours, a dive that would shortly send Boeing’s stock price down by as much as one percent in early trading, before rallying back later in the day.

The 10-second delay, which was calculated by the analysis firm Nanex LLC, indicates that something rare was likely happening in global markets Tuesday morning: Human beings were seeing — and reacting to — news before computer trading programs could move on it. In an era of super-fast algorithmic trading in which delays are measured in milliseconds and less, the ten second gap indicates that possibly no one in global markets has yet figured out a way to incorporate Donald Trump’s tweets into their trading algorithms. If they had, the market response would likely have come much, much faster.

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