Big data's very bad day in the stock market Posted on : Feb 09 - 2016

Investor trends are not the same as predictive analytics because far too much stock market movement is merely knee-jerk reactions with precious little data to aim the kick. But there are those that think big data's very bad day in the stock market is a strong indicator of a slowdown in overall business spending. After all, the thinking goes, if the biggest, baddest, hottest tech – big data – isn't hitting earnings forecasts, then businesses must be seriously curtailing tech purchasing.

Rightly or wrongly, the stock market painted a bleak picture. Tableau lost half its market value by the closing bell on Friday after trimming its forecast by less than 2 percent.

It wasn't the only big data company to take a big hit.

"Walter Pritchard of Citigroup notes that the results from Tableau and ServiceNow make it 'difficult to refute the view that the IT spending environment has become more challenging,'" reported the Wall Street Journal.

"That's proven painful to other stocks tied to cloud and big data themes. Splunk lost nearly one-quarter of its value on Friday, while Hortonworks fell by 17 percent. Stocks on the BVP Cloud Index closed the day with an average loss of 9 percent — nearly triple the Nasdaq's rout for the day."

Yes, it was a very bad day indeed for big data in the stock market.

That's what happens when the leading tech stumbles even slightly. Investors spook easily.

But that doesn't mean that big data companies are necessarily down for the count.

While investors have plenty of good reasons to be skittish overall, big data companies should turn to big data analysis to show them why that fear isn't warranted for the sector or their company -- if indeed that's the case.

It's ironic though, isn't it, that big data companies are so heavily dependent on human emotional whims in the stock market. The world, it seems, still spins on human gut-feelings more than on hard information.

We've still got a long way to go as a species to get to a point where knowledge trumps all and data drives decisions. 

Any time we start thinking that this is a data-driven age, we need only to look at the stock market and politics to see that's not yet true. But we'll get there…eventually. Source