Steve Jobs has died.
Information travels fast today. Online, a tweet can be seen by millions of people an instant after an event. Hundreds and thousands of journalists or bloggers can catch on to any item and post their opinion in minutes. Somewhere, there are computers reading this information, processing this information - trading on this information.
Moments after a statement was put out by Apple. Nasdaq futures started to tumble. Generally, these indices correlate pretty well - especially after hours. Apple (AAPL) is the largest component of the Nasdaq 100 index, even after a rebalancing this year trimmed it down. At the end of the day today, AAPL was more than 14% of the weight of the index. Bad news for Apple is bad news for the Nasdaq 100.
The death of Steve Jobs is a sad occasion indeed. Computers trading on the latest information have no idea what what is going to happen at Apple - they only see negative words associated with AAPL.
