This reads like something out of the pages of Freakonomics: if your company shares part of its name with a celebrity, will a trend in increased mentions of that celebrity in the news cause trading algorithms to infer that your star is rising as well?

Per the Financial Times, improper correlation with starlet Anne Hathaway has quite possibly been the causation of some movement in Berkshire Hathaway’s stock price:

Traders barely noticed that the star of The Devil Wears Prada had hosted last month’s Oscars, until blogger Dan Mirvish spotted an odd pattern: if Ms Hathaway is in the news, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway stock jumps too.

“On the Friday before the Oscars,” he wrote, “Berkshire shares rose a whopping 2.02 per cent.” And the Monday after they shot up 2.94 per cent more. Coincidence? Mr Mirvish thought not, and pointed the finger at confused robotraders – the complex algorithms that execute 70 per cent of stock trades, sometimes by scanning news stories for trends.

I work with data, a lot, so it always interests me to see how others are trying to parse it, especially when they fail. And really guys – for all the sophistication you’ve built into your traderbots you haven’t thought to put a line of code in there to account for “Anne != Berkshire”? (Side note to the bears, if you have some kind of sentiment index for “meltdown” and haven’t updated it recently, you might want to put some AND NOT logic in there to exclude all references to “nuclear,” “Fukushima,” etc.)

Also, the FT beat me to the joke I wanted to use:

Then last year [Buffett] gambled $44bn on the Burlington railroad. But why bother? Instead, just sit back and await the release of [Anne Hathaway's movie] Love and Other Drugs – whose mushy story, of a girl wooing a Viagra salesman, also gave Mr Buffett a rise: up 1.62 per cent.

Additionally, if anyone is interested in funding a small startup to be known as, perhaps, “Olsen Final Four Inc.”, let me know. (Dibs on changing my name to Gaga Lohan and taking the CEO slot.) I’m sure once we take it public we can get a lot of automated interest.