Trends
When I left the house, I headed straight for the City Carrier. As I climbed into the car, I scanned my ID ? no charge for citizens. The City Carrier circles the entire city and its efficient traffic routing means there's almost never any wait for a car. Of course, since they only seat two, they're no good for big groups, but they get the job done most other times.
The car was already moving as I sat down to enter my destination into the console. The store I was headed to is right on the boundary between this district and District B, which meant a bit of a walk from the nearest City Carrier drop point, but for the time being, I had some time to kill.
I doubt there's a better time or place to get some real reading done than a quiet ride like that, so I whipped out my Tabspot and got to it. Truth is, the store isn't so far away that I couldn't have just walked there (which would have gotten Alice off my back about how little I had been exercising), but on that day, I wasn't interested in wasting any time that could have been spent gathering valuable information. My health wouldn't matter one bit if I didn't have the cash to put food on the table.
I glanced out the window as my Tabspot loaded the articles I had queued for review. The shops and houses of the city sprawled out before me in a seemingly unchanging tableau. Thinking about it, nobody feels the Earth move either, but we're hurtling through space at an incredible speed nonetheless. The only reason we don't feel it is because we're rushing into the future along with it. I wondered if the city out there was the same ? changing faster than we realize because we're changing right along with it...
Hanging just to the side of the window was a single, awkwardly positioned emergency handle. It had most likely never been used for anything other than maintenance tests. The system was perfect ? a completely autonomous autopilot system. No traffic jams. No accidents. It has never even been the target of hackers attempting sabotage.
At some point, terrorist acts began to shift from physical warfare to cyber warfare, but even that was effectively extinguished more than half a century ago. In any day and age, there are always unseen entities positioned to make a nice profit by supporting terrorist groups who act based on their own sense of religion and justice. Without funding from wealthy outside groups, nobody has the resources to carry out acts of terrorism any more. Even sovereign nations have to get approval from their government before wartime funds are allocated to armed forces. Fanaticism and the pursuit of justice may still be the engine that drives people to war, but without the fuel of money, it just won't run.
"I think it's about time to pour some more gas into my system too," I thought aloud as I swiped to the next page of text on my Tabspot.
Alice had collected more than 500 news articles for me. This was going to take a while. The filter usually wouldn't let through more than a couple hundred. Must have been more than double the usual buzz working its way around the net that day. It was time to cash in.
I had the news that makes it past my filter sorted into two basic categories, the first of which was fundamentals. This is the big stuff ? economic indicators, currency shifts in key nations, incidents that are likely to affect the bottom lines of multinational corporations. Turns out this kind of stuff isn't just for the big guys: if you're going to make any kind of money playing the market, this stuff is the landscape you've got to navigate.
The other category is trending topics, including the gossip news. Even if people say they hate it, if they can't stop talking about it, it's worth taking a look at. My job is to find the needle in the filthy haystack; I have to find the best ones and dissect them. So many events get classified as too minor or too local that even a skilled government analyst could spend three lifetimes sifting data and not see them all.
As information, neither one is more important than the other. If one is the ruler by which we compare it to other information, than the other might be the puzzle frame we use to define it. Sometimes you need one piece of information in order to regulate, process, reinforce, and then finally reassemble the overall image. It's important to be able to see how the pieces fit together, rather than just stacking them into their separate types.
People argue all the time ? microeconomics this, macroeconomics that, and if they can make enough to get by, good for them. For a trader like me, though, the harsh reality is that everything depends on whether or not you can turn a profit.
"Alice, do any of the stories relating to Olive this news cycle stand out as strangely artificial?" I asked my Tabspot. As I did, a tiny illustrated version of Alice appeared in the corner of the screen.
Alice will disable her more human-like functions to free up processing power for scanning and parsing news on the net, but that doesn't stop her from receiving and executing voice commands.
"Yes, Master," came Alice's answer. "There are five stories this news cycle which deviate heavily from the rest of the widely circulated information regarding Olive Industries. All five have a deviation value that is holding steady over 80."
"Are you saying they are showing no signs of natural attenuation?" I asked.
"That is correct, The flat line generated by their data points is quite aesthetically pleasing."