Free Republic

U.S. stocks were seeing a broad-based rout Thursday, led by a selloff in media, technology, consumer and financial stocks as investors wrestled with worries about a slowdown in global growth. “There is heightened uncertainty that began with yuan devaluation last week, while overall China’s growth is slowing father than thought. This is weighing on confidence,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading & derivatives at Schwab Center for Financial Research. The nervousness on Wall Street was apparent from a jump in the CBOE Volatility index VIX, +16.98% which has gained more than 35% to 17.65 over the past three trading...

The start of trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange CBOE +0.52% was delayed Thursday due to system problems, according to the exchange. The biggest U.S. options exchange by volume said in a system alert that some of its customers were having problems “downloading” information from CBOE early Thursday, and at least one other exchange stopped sending business to the CBOE during the outage. CBOE intially planned to reopen at 10:15 a.m. ET and then again at 10:20 a.m., but later delayed trading with no estimate as to when the exchange might get up and running, according to notices sent...

Stocks fell sharply Thursday after an unexpected spike in jobless claims and as global jitters pushed the dollar higher. -snip- The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down nearly 300 points, or almost 3 percent, and the CBOE volatility index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, spiked more than 20 percent to above 43, its highest level in over a year.

Federal investigators probing the “flash crash” that briefly sliced nearly 1,000 points off the Dow Thursday are zeroing in on a series of “unusually high-volume” trades in S&P futures that originated in Chicago, a government official told POLITICO. Those trades set off a chain reaction of trades that caused the biggest drop within a single day in the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s storied history.