Stock Market - What the hell?

[Ddrak]

Accenture trading for $40 at 2:47pm and $0.01 at 2:48pm?
Procter and Gamble halving its price in the same sort of time period?

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2010/05 ... at-248-pm/
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2010/05 ... -going-on/

What the hell?

Dd

[Fallakin Kuvari]

I'm not buying the reports that 1 bad trade by P&G caused the entire market to fall by almost 10%. It just doesn't seem possible.

Edit: That was the initial reports, btw. Now I see they're trying to pin it to Citi?...

[Embar Angylwrath]

A lot.. and I mean a LOT.. of DOW associated trades are automatic. They are initiated by computer programs, driven by complex algos. I think what you'll see as this story unfolds is those computer programs reacting to a bad trade (the Proctor and Gamble trade) which then initiated automatic buy-sell orders. Whoever offered to sell P&G for $40 when a second earlier it was trading at $60-ish, triggered lightning fast auto-trades linked to any precipitous drop in a DOW stock. What you observed, ladies and gentlemen, was a computerized reaction to a mistake that caused the DOW to drop 700-odd points in less than 15 seconds.

[Ddrak]

That drove Accenture down to a penny? Seriously? NYSE must have no safeguards in there at all.

Dd

[Fallakin Kuvari]

It drove some other stocks down to a penny or 0 as well, then they all jumped back up to $30-50 where they were.