Posted on 09/21/2010 7:00:25 AM PDT by 10Ring
WASHINGTON — As a doctoral candidate in physics at Princeton two decades ago, Gregg E. Berman spent a year and a half in a laboratory searching through subatomic data for an elusive particle called the heavy neutrino.
Now, from his small office at the Securities and Exchange Commission here, the former physicist is busy completing a similarly painstaking task, supervising a team of more than 20 investigators who have spent the last five months scrutinizing reams of stock-trading data and hundreds of interview transcripts in an effort to figure out why stock prices went into free fall for 20 terrifying minutes on May 6.
Their long-awaited report on the so-called flash crash, in partnership with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is due to be published in the next two weeks.
Mr. Berman, 44, will not say exactly what will be in the report, but he says that it will not simply restate what regulators have already said — that markets were volatile because of worries over the debt crisis in Europe, causing some computerized trading programs to stop trading, and finally causing computers on other exchanges to misread the pullback as a rapid bidding down of stock prices.
Instead, he says, the report will zero in on a specific sequence of events that preceded the crash. He says it will tell a clear story about what happened in the markets on that stomach-churning day, beyond simply pointing a finger at the perils of the kind of high-speed computer trading that dominates today’s markets.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Promise?...lol.
For a short period that afternoon there were no buyers.
Can I has grant?
Better to study WHO rather than just WHAT.
the PPT was out on an extended lunch with cocktails and couldn’t get back to their jobs until then...now, skippy the intern covers those 3 hours of the work day for the rest of the office staff so it doesn’t happen again...
Yore dewing it rong!
How is one an ‘ex’ physicist?? Open the head and scoop all the ‘physics’ knowledge out??
I know what you mean- My physics degree ruined monster movies for me too. and most sci-fi.
I can’t help watching and thinking “nope... can’t happen that way..”
Mike
I’ve noticed that even in academia the hard sciences and business fold ten to be more grounded in the real world! I guess that whole ‘math thing’ really ruins the ability to move in and out of fantasy world.
If you read between the lines in Harry Markopolos’ testimony, he essentially says the same thing. The lawyers at the SEC had a level of innumeracy such that they did not understand the information about Madoff that he sent them.
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