You let the computer pick stocks for you. But not randomly...based on a certain set of conditions (like high yield or low risk, etc.), you’re likely to get a bunch of stocks that share more than just the characteristics of being high yield or low risk. They’ll also likely have other things in common, like being in the same industry or being companies that have similar business profiles or management philosophies.
Attribute bias is the tendency for those auto-selected securities to have more in common than you asked for. Let’s say you decide to use the built-in tool on your trading software that gathers a collection of securities that fit a certain profile you’re interested in (high-earning or stable or low risk, etc.). The bots inside your computer return a whole list that fit the profile to a T. When you go to buy some of those securities, you may be getting more than just a group of stocks that all fit the profile of "stable." You might be getting stable stocks that are all in tech or maybe agriculture or companies that have similar leadership styles.
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to an un-diversified portfolio.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is program trading?14 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is program trading? okay well watch two episodes of
Big Bang Theory if you first watch one episode of Keeping Up with the [Man and woman watching TV]
Kardashians deal alright no different kind of program trading, program trades
in a Wall Street sense are run by a computer program, hence the catchy name
and it's also called the black box like a program kicks out that if the S&P 500
is down 0.3 percent in an hour and the US dollar has risen relative to the
pound and goog is outperforming the tech index and the moon is in the seventh
house and Jupiter is aligned with Mars then short a million shares of GE like
that would be something that the box would tell you or something like that
and there are a ton of weird mathy things behind the rationale for each of [Math formulas appear]
these trades some of it makes sense to normal people but most of it needs three
PhDs in math and physics and other stuff to translate rationally
well the dangerous thing here about program trades is that usually there is
no human involved when they execute a trade that is it's just computers
talking to other computers but thankfully computers never have glitches [Computer chip blowing off steam]
right they never have mistakes and things generally always run smoothly
when computers are involved right well this is a really smart way to manage
your retirement money just give it all to a black box and assume the guys who
wrote the algorithm knew what they were doing or maybe not [Hacker using a PC]
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