Given the awesome correlating powers of today's stock trading computers, the idea may not be as far-fetched as you think.

A couple weeks ago, Huffington Post blogger Dan Mirvish noted a funny trend: when Anne Hathaway was in the news, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway's shares went up. He pointed to six dates going back to 2008 to show the correlation. Mirvish then suggested a mechanism to explain the trend: "automated, robotic trading programming are picking up the same chatter on the Internet about 'Hathaway' as the IMDb's StarMeter, and they're applying it to the stock market."

The idea seems ridiculous. But the more I thought about the strange behavior of algorithmic trading systems and the news that Twitter sentiment analysis could be used by stock market analysts and the fact that many computer programs are simply looking for tradeable correlations, I really started to wonder if Mirvish's theory was plausible.

I called up John Bates, a former Cambridge computer scientist whose company Progress Software works with hedge funds and others to help them find new algorithmic strategies. I asked, "Is this at all possible?" And I was surprised that he answered, roughly, "Maybe?"

"We come across all sorts of strange things in our line of business, strange correlations," Bates told me. "And I've had a lot of interest in this for a long time because it's really often the secret source for certain hedge funds."