It has been a bad week for established British media brands. Just days after the BBC’s director general and the organisation’s head of news both resigned following criticism over ‘misleading’ editing of footage of Donald Trump, Spear’s can reveal that inaccurate world markets data was published on the front page of the Financial Times.
The prices and percentage change figures for several indices and assets quoted on the front page of the 8 November edition of FT Weekend do not add up.
For example, the quoted price of the FT Wilshire 2500 Index – described as a ‘benchmark of the institutional-sized (in terms of capitalisation) companies in the US equity market’ – for 7 November was 8567.59. The equivalent value for the previous day was quoted as exactly the same, yet the percentage change between the two days’ prices was calculated as +0.26 per cent.
There were also errors in the table relating to the quoted prices of cryptocurrencies.
Related
The given value of Bitcoin for 7 November was 101110.2 (i.e., $101,110.20); the previous day’s value was listed as 100989.3. This equates to a change of +0.12 per cent, yet the percentage change was listed as +0.05 per cent.
The quoted value of Ethereum for 7 November was 3304.8; the previous day’s value was listed as 3281.8. This equates to a change of +0.7 per cent, but the quoted percentage change was a negative figure (-0.63 per cent) suggesting a decline in the value of the asset rather than the increase shown by the quoted prices.
None of the Ethereum prices quoted on the front page of the FT for 7 November or the previous day exactly match the figures published for the intraday high, intraday low, market open, market close or adjusted close prices published by Yahoo Finance.
The FT’s ‘World Markets’ data is provided by ICE (Intercontinental Exchange Inc), a Fortune 500 company with a market capitalisation of $87 billion that provides ‘financial technology and data services across major asset classes’.
Content from our partners
Spear’s approached ICE for comment, posing several specific questions about the inaccurate data, including whether generative or general artificial intelligence (gen AI) had been used in the preparation of the tables. AI tools such as ChatGPT often make errors in their rendering of tables or data.
In an email, a spokesperson for ICE Exchanges told Spear’s: ‘We are investigating with the data team and very much appreciate you alerting us to this.’
The FT did not respond to a request for comment.
