Posted on 05/06/2010 7:33:47 PM PDT by The Magical Mischief Tour
Some CNBC Stock Analyst commenting on the supposed trading error just said that we have in place some kind of shield rules or regs that are in place to stop such a mistake.
That its not possible to make that kind of mistake for the very reasons we witnessed today.
They are openly speculating this was intentional and not an error and say that we need to demand full disclosure of actions and events that led up to the sell off.
So to those in the know here, is this true, the shield regs/rules, and if so what kind of failure would need to take place for such rules to be "suspended" or "bypasses"?
In short, you cannot mistakenly use a Millions instead of Billions without it triggering something and stopping the trade before it becomes active/public etc...
Thats ok, the story was only for the naive anyway.
I sure wondered how such a simple error could wreak such havoc . . . with all the chances for a typo-type error
That's just it, this guy just said the SEC has triggers in place to stop such trades before they even leave the barn. This should have never left the system, let alone made it to the floor into the public sales areas.
A trading error doesn’t explain a number of stocks apparently doing the impossible of going to zero.
No way, no how.
Sabotage from an Asian power?
‘The System Worked.’
In the era of Obama’s Trillion Dollar deficits, all of the major financial institutions have moved their calculator commas over three places......
More likely a power play from Wall Stret to The One about reform. Probably Goldman sending a message that “they” can make or break him.
Forty years ago I was a civilian programmer working for the USMC PX system. When it came to cutting checks or other financial entries, we had a limit that kicked in. If someone entered, say $5,000, the message came up to the effect “Do you REALLY mean that amount?” and if the reply was “Yes”, the clerk had to get an OK from a human higher up.
So, I will not believe in something even more complex that affects hundreds of thousands of people that some clerk could “accidentally” enter a wrong figure. That excuse smelleth to the High Heavens.
BTTT
George Soros???
This was a dress rhearsal to shake confidence in the market that will set up the 401k grab.
There have certainly been a few major “hit the button by accident” trading errors in the past of market-moving size, but not on this scale. We don’t actually know what trades set off this chain of dominoes, so it’s hard to say exactly what, if anything, should have automatically stopped it. Personally, I think the exchanges should have the authority to call an instant halt to trading any time they see unexpected and unexplained huge moves in any direction — whether in the market as a whole or in an individual stock or other security or derivative.
I still haven’t seen an actual source for the “16 billion e-mini S&P 500 futures” claim, so it’s still on the random rumor shelf as far as I’m concerned. It’s possible that this was a coordinated and intentional market disruption, and if so, it was very likely done with coordinated trades of fairly normal size, to avoid setting off immediate suspicion and drastic action from regulators. If the 16 billion instead of 16 million story turns out to be true, then it’s clearly something that one or more systems SHOULD have caught and blocked, and a system failure is to blame. Then the big question is whether the system failure was accidental or deliberate. The trade itself would almost certainly have been accidental, but the system failure that allowed it to go through could well have been engineered deliberately.
The circuit-breakers are clearly not working as they should, and clearly need to be updated. Unfortunately, this means making them a lot more complex, instead of the expressed-in-one-sentence circuit-breaker rules currently in place. E.g. when a number of unrelated stocks (or other exchange-traded securities or derivatives) start plunging or sky-rocketing simultaneously, while nothing much is happening to a lot of others, that really should trigger an immediate “lights out” intervention — give the regulators time to scan the trading logs for some explanation, before hundreds of thousands of additional trades are made based on what almost certainly started as accidental or deliberate trading anomalies.
Really doubt that an entry error was the cause of this meltdown...
New York exchange completely stopped trading for 90 seconds to evaluate the sell deluge. Meanwhile, trades continued going through other exchanges.
Basicly, they had NO BUYERS and lots of sellers, for a period of time, and it triggered the programmed trades.
With Obama spending money like mad, the MSM is covering diverting attention from the main story and covering for its man.
Me too. If a single entry error was involved, it was at most a major contributing factor, Something else had to have gone wrong too.
I wish I could believe the tinfoil-hatters who are claiming that the regulators are hiding the truth from us. But I don’t believe it, and that’s a lot scarier, because it means that several hours after the fact, they STILL haven’t been able to identify the key events that triggered this.
I have hard that P&G is asking for an investigation of todays action. Apparently it was dark markets moving the market around. And that is no ‘glitch’. I would believe that more than a glitch since I watched it and at one time there were no bids or no offers.
I have never seen anything like it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_liquidity
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