I do. Well, I don't necessarily believe this -- but I do recognize that it's a distinct possibility.
I read a great book written some years ago by Benjamin Graham . . . who was Warren Buffet's mentor. One chapter is filled with examples of wild gyrations in stock prices due to investors making mistakes with the actual stock symbols of the companies they were trading.
Take a look at this data from a 1-minute intraday chart of Procter & Gamble today (unfortunately FR’s software takes out extra spaces between the numbers so it’s not easy to read):
Time Open High Low Close Change Volume
14:44 60.86 61.15 59.46 60.96 0.15 256934
14:45 59.65 60.86 56.50 57.36 -3.60 373803
14:46 57.36 59.40 47.51 47.71 -9.65 278273
14:47 49.00 57.01 39.37 55.00 7.29 469579
14:48 55.00 62.05 53.00 58.00 3.00 303799
14:49 57.79 60.34 57.00 59.48 1.48 352332
14:50 59.67 62.59 58.91 62.59 3.11 241590
I heard on CNBC that this action in Procter & Gamble was the main cause of the breakdown in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This kind of breakdown between 2:44 PM and 2:48 PM should not be possible in a big consumer goods stock like PG without any big news. I heard these low trades happened on the Nasdaq exchange. Some of it was normal cascading stop loss orders triggering each other in sequence, but still there should always be enough buyers in the way to prevent a drop of $17.99 in less than two minutes. This is all assuming that the data from my chart service is correct, and it has historically been a highly reliable chart service.
In any event, this action in PG needs to be investigated and I heard today that Procter & Gamble is asking for an SEC investigation of the trading in their stock today.