fat fingered friday, page-52

FLASH CRASH

Dow Jones was down 998 at one point. Hit 9872.57.
S&P 500 was down 8.6% at worst.
Biggest points fall since 1987 Crash.
Fell 500 points in five minutes.
Fall triggered by some as yet unexplained glitch in Proctor & Gamble trading (it was down 37% at worst) that sent the stock down 20% in 90 seconds (P&G is one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones index). It is not clear why yet with talk of a trader (Citigroup rumoured) hitting a b (billion) instead of an m (million) on a sell order. Lucky he didnt hit g (Gazzillion).
One focus is on futures contracts tied to the Standard & Poors 500 stock index, known as E-mini S&P 500 futures, and in particular a two-minute window in which 16 billion of the futures were sold Citigroup's volume in E-minis was 9bn on the day.

Computer triggered trading took over from there as stop loss after stop loss created more and more selling. The same thing happened on the upside as the market rallied 650 points from its low to the close.
The main exchanges say there was no error on their part although some trades in three stocks including Proctor & Gamble and Accenture will be cancelled.
At 2.47pm the US shares of Accenture were $40. One minute later they were at 1c.The trades are being investigated by Nasdaq.
The Nasdaq is cancelling trades in stocks that were more than 60% from the last price. An admission that there was some sort trading error.
VIX Volatility index was up 60% at one point.