Slashdot Mirror
The 3 Billion Dollar Typo
Rand310 writes "Mizuho, the world's second largest bank based in Japan, with total assets of nearly the GDP of France (around 1.2 trillion USD) accidentally sold 610,000 shares, valued at $3.1 billion... for 1 yen each. A 27 billion yen loss would almost match Mizuho Securities' group net profit of 28.1 billion yen for the financial year ended in March, though... the incident would not threaten the brokerage's financial stability. FYI 1 yen is about .83 cents. Yesterday one share was selling at $5,065, today you could theoretically have bought 610,000 shares for $.0083 each. An expensive switch of variables."
To FAR. I wonder which online deal site this was posted on first?
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Please mash the keypad and a special typing wand will be sent to you.
I need to give them my number for when they want to do another transaction like this, they can sell them to me.
No, the shares weren't actually sold for 1 yen each. From TFA:
Selling the shares for 572,000 yen is where the 27 billion yen figure came from, not selling them for 1 yen.
Also...
Aside from the fact that you couldn't have theoretically bought the shares because of market safeguards already mentioned, that sentence is missing a very important word: 610,000 shares for $.0083 each.
Still, it would have been one helluva holiday sale, wouldn't it?
The other thing I thought was interesting was from the other article. It said:
How much yen do you want to bet that it's one of those stupid "Are you sure?" dialog boxes that everyone clicks "Yes" to without actually thinking about what it's asking? Ah, how I love ignoring those warnings, too.
From TFA: No buyer was actually able to pick up the phantom shares for 1 yen due to market rules designed to limit price fluctuations...
i love sensational media.
I thought you said $0.83 each, as in per share. So how could you, then, purchase 610,000 shares for $0.0083?
They should have done it a little closer to Christmas though
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I wonder how many times the person(s) hit "Yes I am sure" when the system was telling them not to do it...
What's with these asian traders? Does their software just suck or are they all fumble fingers? Didn't this just happen a few months ago in a similar story?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
From TFA..... No buyer was actually able to pick up the phantom shares for 1 yen due to market rules designed to limit price fluctuations, but the shares may have gone as cheaply as 572,000 yen ($4,750) each, a more than 9 percent discount to the intended sale price. ....
Mizuho's error has so far cost the broker some 27 billion yen ($224 million), Fukuda estimated.
It appears that, in fact, they didn't lose BILLIONS but a few millions. Still large, but the post is misleading.
You could have bought 1 share for $.83, not 610,000 shares for $.0083.
610,000 shares would have cost $506,300 (plus commissions).
Surely there was some kind of trigger in the software that would detect these kind of errors! Windows asks if im sure when I try to delete a file and even then it only sends to to the recyle bin!
When you think about it, all these investment banks do is take nothing, divide it up, sell it, and make a huge amount of profit on the hard work of entrepreneurs. Mizuho will no doubt be forced to pay back the difference to J-Com, but that's too late, really. Some lucky souls bought in at that low price and made up to 500,000% profit on the error.
So much capital floating around based on the creation of nothing. Is there a more apt description of the modern world?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
FTFA "The sell order, which was more than the available shares, somehow went through the TSE system.
That to me is much more disturbing.
I just wonder who's going to get the blame, IT or the software vendor?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
C'mon... 1 yen = .83US? Get real... I just ordered 15,000 yen worth of stuff from japan the other day...
1.00 JPY Japan Yen = 0.00829773 USD United States Dollars
-FL
It was a $225 Million, not $3 Billion you troll.
Knowing japan, s/he has probably already hung themselves.
Still, it's pretty wild that something like this even happened at all. With all the safeguards, and all the people supposed to be watching this type of activity... NO ONE caught it? A lot of people are going to lose their jobs over this one. Luckily they didn't really sell them for 1 yen each. Imagine how hard their market would've taken a fall then?
Im curious how this is going to effect the business itself.
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
As someone else pointed out Not On Slashdot, something like this has been reported before. 4 years before, in fact. Note that the number & price of the shares in each report are 610,000 shares at 1 yen each.
Now, what do you think that chances of this happening twice are? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Since it's a Japanese bank, wouldn't it be "Ray off da Makudonarudo"?
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
The company made a horrendous mistake and yet, there you see two executives bowing apologetically and taking responsibility on the day it happened .
I have to wonder how a U.S. bank would have handled such a mistake?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
The only reason this is amusing is that nothing came of it. It makes a scary headline, encourages ill-informed comments about an overseas financial system (bonus points: the currency is an awkward one to mentally associate with dollars or euros, etc), and (to the average reader) somehow makes technology people look bad. This was just a silly thing to report, period.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Most exchanges will call the members who have accidentally benefited from another member's mistake and ask them politely to agree to void the deal. Although not obligated to do so, most brokerages typically honor this request as they have to assume that they will be the next ones to make a mistake.
I hope you aren't trading using that conversion rate
So what are we to actually learn from this article?
That the Japanese actually make typos from time to time?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It's pretty brilliant. What it does is where there's a bank transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into your account.
A few weeks ago I engaged in some slightly complicated stock transactions, where I sold a company short then issued an order to buy it back if it rose to a certain price (in case it rose unexpectedly). Before I punched the "confirm" button I spent rather a long time making sure that I was saying "Only buy it when it hits that price" not "Offer to buy it at that price", which would have resulted in a huge loss for me.
This guy's problem was presumably different; he knew what the forms meant but entered the wrong numbers. Still, it's kind of scary to be looking at a computer screen and thinking, "I hope this is right, or it's REALLY gonna suck."
I can only assume that this was done by an employee who gave their two weeks notice, and was not immediately escorted to the front door.
For anyont who RTFA'd, 610,000 shares at 1Y were offered, not bought. The error so far has cost about $224 million, and may eventually cost $250 million. That's a huge cost for a trader error, but it's not $3 billion.
And I don't think this qualifies as a typo. How about "data entry error"? Or how about software bug, since the number of shares sold was more than the number of available shares.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Regardless of the numbers I'm sure someone, somewhere, is going to get their head handed to them on a platter. A bank's reputation alone is priceless. I suddenly don't feel so bad about the times I've overpaid $50 or so for things in the past.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The mistake was not $3 billion dollars, it was closer to $225 million, as the article fully explains. Sensationalism at its best.
Why was this not on SlickDeals...this would have been the slickest deal of the century!
In addition to a Megabytes -> Library of congresses conversion, we now have a conversion of Frances to USD. I make 4.5833e-8 Frances last year!
A Lehmann Brothers trader keyed in a £300m sell instead of £3m in 2001 and cost the company £20,000 (in fines, cos he moved the FTSE downwards with such a large sell order).
And a Bear Stearns employee typed in $4bn instead of $4m in 2002, again moving the index (thsi time the Dow Jones) down.
Mostly though these positions are unwound by agreement between the parties. I don't understand why that didn't apply here.
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
16 shares at 610,000 each transposed to 610,000 shares at 16 yen each in the original.
Today's story is 1/610,000 ; still, very suspicious, but we'll see.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I'd be really curious to know how something so dramatic could possibly be written with a "check" that could be ignored with trivial effort or due to plain inattention. Yes, it's human nature to ignore "Confirm" dialogs, and efforts to explain things to the user within the standard Windows API so often end up like the "Do you really want to save this as a CSV" dialogs in Excel. But c'mon -- no single point of failure should result in something like this happening.
There has to be an escalation process in place to bounce serious problems up a review tree for others to scope out. You'd think bankers, of all people, would demand that from their software. I can't even post a news item on our intranet without legal reviewing it, for goodness' sake.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
If I were working for the Japanese analog of FTC, my ears would be so-o-o pricked for an sweet inside deal somewhere in the middle of all this exciting stuff right now.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
So like...they almost sold the shares for way cheap... but they didn't... and that's newsworthy? Isn't that like I almost formatted my C drive... but it errored out because the drive was in use.... WHEW! CLOSE ONE!
It appears the mice have finished reconstructing the question. Since this version of the Earth has now fulfilled its purpose, is it time to make way for the intergalactic highway? And, uh... can I get a ride offa here?
MORTAR COMBAT!
Wonder who's gonna commit sepuku this time?
Slashdot: The 3 Billion Dollar Typo
Digg: $225 million dollar typo
It's over, Slashdot. You're slow, inaccurate, outdated and irrelevant. Digg is the future.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
What if the order was entered intentially for the broker's accomplices to capitalize on the discounted stock?
That is the problem with Dialog boxes poping up TOO much. Its just like the story of the boy who cryed wolf. No one reads or pays attention to them anymore. Its worse that if they weren't there at all, because now no one reads them when they are really important!
Think Deeply.
Here's a pretty good definition of short
"they borrow shares of the stock from their broker, sell those shares at the current market price and then hope to make a profit by replacing the borrowed shares with shares they'll buy on the market after the price of the stock has dropped" (CNN)
This I believe is a futures market which is different than the buying and selling of available shares on a daily basis. What this trader did was put in an order to trade more shares than available and the system executed the trade.
The software has the balance of shares available at any given moment, but somehow this trade did not pass through that check. That's pretty bad news considering this is one of the big financial markets.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Actually, this was big news at where I work. I work in Japan at a company that makes stock analysis software and sevices... anyways, I had to take some tests about how the stock market works and techincal/fundamental analysis techinques.. and I just confirmed with one of my books. For Mizuho's stock.. the largest loss it can incur in one day is 200,000 yen. Around $1,600 or so I guess. So there is no way for it be sold for 1 yen as this article suggests. Of course I may be missing some special conditions.. my Japanese isn't perfect :P
SMUNFA
That's one fat finger..... Unless of course, they already cut it off....
" ... accidentally sold 610,000 shares, valued at $3.1 billion ... for 1 yen each. ..."
... A 27 billion yen loss ..."
... FYI 1 yen is about .83 cents. ..."
... today you could theoretically have bought 610,000 shares for $.0083. ..."
;-).
No, they didn't.
"
Huh? Nobody lost, or "won", anything. There were no trades at that price.
"
This one, despite other posts to the contrary, is about right (today's rate is 0.00841 to the USD, or 0.841 yen = 1 cent). Considering the math proficiencey demonstrated so far, I'd give him a "close is good enough" checkmark on this question, to avoid the embarassing, and apparently inevitable, goose egg on his math final.
"
No you couldn't. And even if you could, you couldn't.
The company doesn't have 600 thousand shares outstanding to sell, for one thing; share owners must agree to sell at that price for another.
Pity the poor bastard who made a sell order "at market", though
Market rules prohibited the trade from being completed, for another. And that's about $0.0083 per share, it would have cost you about $US 5130.10 plus brokerage fees at today's exchange rate.
The short answer here, for those of you whose heads are exploding from the bad, bad Math and English Composition at work here, is some trader placed an order for one share, valued at around $5K, and made a mistake somehow.
Instead of an offer of one share for that price, the order was entered as 610,000 shares for the price of one share. As it turns out, some shares were sold at a discount of 9% (ie $US 4,750 per share; ie some owners were willing to make a sell order "at market" ) because the market rules allowed that much of a price drop before trading restrictions or outright halts kicked in (the news stories don't say what the mechanism for price monitoring is or does, but obviously, it works).
Well, time for Seppuku!
"A good compromise leaves everyone mad." -Calvin
Whats really costing them is that they are obligated to buy back the shares because they don't have what they sold.
As they sold far in advance of the number of outstanding shares, their in a bind.
According to TFA, the shares all sold for about $4,750. They where initially trading at about $5,065. Multiply the difference by 610,000 shares, and you have a loss of about $190 Million.
Problem is that they have to settle by December 13th. The Tokyo Stock Exchange will not allow them to simply pay the differnce of $315 per share to the buyers.
The current share holders, understanding the situation, see annother big payday. They can ask for any price they want, Mizuho must purchase 610,000 shares by December 13th, and there's only about 15,000 shares outstanding.
They have to buy shares, distribute them to those that bought them through the error. Then, they have to buy those back, to give to other buyers. Then they have to repeat about 40times.
Seems to me that the Tokyo Stock Exchange should just rule that it was an error, and make Mizuho pay $315 for each share erroneously sold.
All this means is that someone hacked the system and made this happen. That person just missed that last safe guard, and the news story is damage control for the company.
In other news, a staff of 27 IT professionales who worked for Mizuho Bank Int. commited suicide by traditional japanese means exactly 10 minutes after the stock market opened today.
I think you are missing some important data. A Broker business has a client that connects to the market (server) software. There are companies that write this kind of software. I don't think there are many, but they are out there. http://www.tradearca.com/default.asp is one.
In this case it is most definitely a hole of some kind in the market software because it didn't check the transaction against what was available in the market.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
That he read in the paper about some guy accidently having his elbow or something on the enter key on a number pad on a keyboard, and buying a few million dollars worth of shares of something due to that.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
article:n b20051209a2.htm
http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?
Yomimasu kudasai...
Please read the URL above...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Did the editors even RTFA?
In other news, a Slashdot typo blows a sensational story even further out of proportion.
Here's another article with slightly different information. - via Digg
This summary doesn't actually tell you what happened. It tells you that they lost money, but I had to go to the article to find out HOW.
If you check this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10394551/ you'll see the problem. That guy is clearly playing Solitaire. You never realized how dangerous that was, did you?
Looks like poor coding allowed him to make the mistake. Software should have been able to see the drastic change in price before it made it to a live database. But we in IT get blamed for everything anyway why not this.
Trader commits Hara-Kiri
The employee has been fired.
The employee is now rich.
The employee* took an open position the day before
(=sold shares he didn't have, that is common practice).
*or someone trusted
Million Dollar Screenshot
Yet Anotehr Slasdhot Page View Generator. Brilliant! Instead of quoting exchange rates based on the unit denomination of the two countries (as is customary), quote them using one of either country's smaller denominations. In this case, US pennies. You only need one person to misread it and think that the exchange rate has a misplaced decimal. If it will make you feel any better, I almost fell for this myself. I've said it before and I'll say it again, errors on /. stories aren't mistakes. They're pure pageview generating genius! Hats off.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
It sounds like the number of shares that they were trying to sell was four times greater than the total number of outstanding shares issued by the company. Even if they were trying to sell short, there's no way the transaction would have been legitimate.
I think an easier solution than trying to keep the trading systems constantly aware of every company's number of total outstanding shares, is just to have some sort of a special warning that would come up when you are attempting to buy or sell at a price that's more than one or two standard deviations off from the mean price of shares sold of that stock in the last day of trading. Since the warning would only come up when you tried to do something extreme, people wouldn't get too used to seeing it -- it wouldn't be like a confirmation dialog that they'd have to click every time they wanted to complete a transaction.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Note the following:
What ever happens it's going to cost Mizuho a bundle.
Typos in order entry screens happen all the time and there should be systems in place to catch them. Obviously there was a bigger error than that made by the clerk.
In other words, the guy responsible will not be getting fired alone. The entire group responsible for reality checking all transactions in gone, including especially the department head, who probably won't ever be allowed to work in a bank again.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Last I checked, 1 yen was approximately equal to 1 cent (yes, it can fluctuate, but your never going to have 1 yen equalling one dollar unless the US becomes a third world country). Mizuho's site says they have 650 billion yen of capital, which is about $6.5 billion US Dollars very roughly, or $5.4 billion USD to be exact... According to this list, The top bank in just the US (Citigroup) has over $1 trillion in assets, 2nd has $771 billion (JPMorgan Chase), and 20th largest (Regions Financial) has $48.6 billion. That is much more then Mizuho by far. I have no clue as to how accurate that site is, but a small bank located around where I live has $2 billion in assets, so I know national (and global) banks most be worth much more.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
People need to understand that money in stocks and dividends isn't creating money from nothing.
Sounds like "something - d - o - o economics. Anyone? Anyone?"
You are confused.
Something did come of it, as stated in the article's headline: "Mizuho loses $224m on typing error." As noted in the article, this "would almost match Mizuho Securities' group net profit of 28.1 billion yen for the financial year ended in March...." At the time of the article, there were still shares outstanding which the bank had not yet re-purchased indicating that further losses could be coming.
While the shares did not trade at the 1 yen level entered into the system, they traded as low as the "circuit breaker" mechanism (designed to prevent large gaps downward in prices) allowed them to go. The Tokyo stock market, by the way, also traded down nearly 2% on the day due at least in part to the fear this caused.
CNN reports http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/12/09/mizuho. error.main.reut/index.html /. on this if you don't mind.
that the error cost "up to $224 million". I prefer to trust CNN to
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
It is "Yonde Kudasai" ! Mistakes like this might cost you, however not as much as the parent topic I hope. Ganbatte ne !
The summary says ".83 cents" - that's the right amount. 0.83 cents = $0.0083. Before you flame, check your own math.
I think the bourse should categorize this as an obvious mistrade and undo it. At least on the SWX stock exchange, they have such a mechanism.
http://www.swx.com/trading/fees/other_en.html (last paragraph)
The stock can move up or down by 20% in one day. If the trigger limits are reached the survillence team gets into action to investigate if the stock is being rigged and track the unusual movement. The system won't accept a SELL order @ 0.01 if the last traded price was 5,000.
From TFA:
"No buyer was actually able to pick up the phantom shares for 1 yen due to market rules designed to limit price fluctuations, but the shares may have gone as cheaply as 572,000 yen ($4,750) each, a more than 9 percent discount to the intended sale price."
So the headline is wrong and/or the poster did not RTDA.
"How's that funny? What is it that tickles the moderators - the tradition or the act itself?"
...when worlds collide...
The tradition applied to the modern context.
This can't happen in the NASDAQ market. There is a "clearly erroneous" rule, which allows trades made due to computer error (operator-caused or programmer-caused doesn't matter). Basically, a transaction at a "clearly erroneous" price can be un-done ("busted").
To operate a computer-based market without such a protection in place is pretty reckless.
You know when you get in a fender bender and your stomach just sinks? Well imagine what losing 3 billion dollars feels like... argh.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Somehow I don't think the excuse of "Guess I must have fat fingered it!" will fly on this one. No stocking stuffer or Christmas bonus for that guy. One work ... sepuku.
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
Not $B mistakes, but did once make a mistake in currency conversion with online trading. Only when the brokerage called up to say I can't cover do I figure it out. The immediacy of online transactions allows for immediate mistakes!
I hate that. There should be a dead space or something to allow unintentionally redirected input from having an effect. More importantly there should be a way for software to get attention without stealing focus.
In Warlords II (not to be confused with Warcraft II) if you choose to resign a game you have two options, Graciously or Ungraciously.
If you resign Ungraciously all your cities are razed. They are out of play and none of the remaining players can benefit from them.
If you select Graciously you are asked, "graciously?"
Clicking anywhere makes that box go away and another appears asking, "GRACIOUSLY?"
Clicking again brings a third box with, "GRACIOUSLY??????"
Another click brings up the last box, which says, "I don't think so. I'm going to burn them all anyway."
One more click takes you back to the map with all your newly razed cities.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I have to wonder how a U.S. bank would have handled such a mistake?
Well, in a different time long ago in Japan, there would've been some heads literally rolling... off the tips of swords.
If this happened at a US bank in Chicago or NYC or anywhere in New Jersey, then a couple of large guys with no necks and scarred faces, wearing $1500 hand-tailored Italian business suits would be taking care of the matter in a similar, yet somewhat less tidy manner.
Is more than 1.6 trillion USD, not 1.2. And that's using the purchasing power parity exchange rate, with which the euro is cheaper than its market rate. So at market rate that's even more when expressed in USD.
If 0.841 yen = 1 cent, that means 1 yen = 1/0.841 cent or ~1.19 cent. If you are going to criticize math, make sure you get your own right :)
In 2005, stock trade was happening. ...
Executive 1: What happen?
Executive 2: Some one set up us the typo.
Executive 2: We get phone call.
Executive 1: What!!!
Executive 2: Main line pick up.
Executive 1: It's you!!!
Exchange commission: How are you gentlemen?
Exchange commission: All your shares are belong to us!
Exchange commission: You are on the way to insolvency.
Executive 1: What you say !!
Exchange commission: You have no chance to reverse transaction make your time.
Exchange commission: Ha ha ha ha
Executive 2: Sir !! Executive 1: Make every apology!
Executive 1: You know what you doing.
Executive 1: Move 'apology'.
Executive 1: For great face saving.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Lumbergsan: "Hitome, did you get that memo about the decimal places, that went out the other day?"
Hitome: "Yes, I have it right here."
Lumbergsan: "Yeah... It's just that we're making sure all the decimal points are in the right places now, and we've noticed you seem to have had a bit of a problem yesterday... "
Hitome: "Yes sir, I made a mistake, but I will be more careful."
Lumbergsan: "Yeah... Well see we need to make sure all the decimal points are in the right places, that's what the memo was about. I'll get you a copy of it."
Hitome: "No it's okay, I have it right here, I read it, I just made a mistake. It won't happen again."
Lumbergsan: "No... I don't think it will. I'm going to have to ask you to go ahead and... commit suicide, ok? Good..."
Now why isn't I can't get in on something like that? Man, just think how much money you would make!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
With the help of Nostradamus, I shorted their stock before hand cashed in afterwards and then did a hostile takeover of Larry Ellison's house...
this is not a mundane detail, Michael!
Buys instead of sells. Sells instead of buys.
Most traders make a few mistakes a week - but they catch them in seconds and back out the position. It's the ones that are made and not noticed for weeks that cost the real money.
It's part of the game - the risk a trader takes. When you find the error, you fix it by going the opposite direction immediately and then forget about it - Like Tiger woods at the next tee after he misses a 3ft put.
It can be *really* entertaining though! I once watched a lady melt down when she realized 20 minutes after the market closed that she had not sold 100 shares of a blue chip stock, she had types in the 12 digit account number and the firm was on the short side of a multi-hundred-million dollar trade.
Flip a coin... She lost the company only $80,000 as it was covered at 9:30 am the next morning and it could have just as easily been a brilliantly profitable trade.
THis is always there - you'd think $250 Million would buy a company a good set of electronic surveilance systems to identify outliers which just seem odd ('why is our guy selling this 610,000 yuan stock at 1yuan?!' says the comp in a split second). But there will *always* be human error.
Torontoman
Michael Bolton: Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane
detail.
Peter Gibbons: Oh! What is this fairly mundane detail, Michael?!!!!
Or seppuku surveillance, or whatever they call it over there...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
If you have time. can you contact my old boss? He needs a little input from you. I tried that idea once with him. It wasnt even a MAJOR mistake like this one. He pretty much took my by the hand down to management and told them that I did it...... and walked away leaving me to the wolves.
Actually, 1 yen is closer to 83% of one cent, not 83 cents. I also like mooses.
$0.83USD is about equal to 100 Yen, not 1.
Confirmation Dialogs don't need to get more complicated, they need to get a bit smarter. For instance Firefox's install confirmation dialog. It counts down a few seconds 2 or 3 before you can click to proceed. It's not long enough to create an issue, not annoying as typing, and it's just long enough to convince people to read the dialog because they have nothing better to do while it counts down. The submission was extremely poorly written.
From TFA: "Mizuho Securities Co. suffered losses of at least 27 billion yen following an error on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in which its order to sell one share for 610,000 yen each was accidentally listed as 610,000 shares for 1 yen."
so according to TFA, an investor could in fact have booked an order for 610000 sh for exactly 1 yen, not for 610000 yen. The original wording was correct: 610000 sh for exactly 1 yen is what was reported there and relayed here to
I just wonder who's going to get the blame, IT or the software vendor?
Most likely the user will get all the blame. It's like when a plane crashes. AAALLWAYS pilot error. Could NEVER have been the manufactrer or air traffic control. Sometimes it is the pilot, but come on. People don't make screw ups this big all by themselves.
May the Maths Be with you!
Instead of pressing the "reboot later" button on those windows, you grab the very top left portion of the title bar and drag them down past the clock in the lower right so they are entirely off the screen except for a few pixels. No more will pop up as long as one is still open.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
610,000 shares for $.0083 each
No irony, no incorrect submission.
Suposedly, for unusualy large or small orders their is some sort of autobackup didly. Also jut for this reason many trades are not real time. However----
As I read the article I was struck by the fact that this is quite a bit of money. I would like to now place my order for cheap stock thingies and I'll just sell them on ebay. I think it is a good idea. I will bundle an Xbox too.
Tokyo Stock exchange will probably bust the trade. Poor controls are a huge regulatory concern so Mizuhno will get dinged with fines and restrictions post-incident and the trader becomes a joke for weeks on his one share order that shook the markets or gets sent packing to save face. Ideally- they should be suspended from trading except to unwind positions for clients until better controls are implemented. Rogue Traders and Poor Controls are possible only through poor supervision and risk management. I bet every firm globally is running this acid test today (not in production)to see if they capable of this type of event, if they didnt code around it already...perfect timing-end of year and performance reviews/bonus.
You missed the part where the businessmen resign after apologizing. In Japan, it's rare for a company to actually fire an exec--or anyone, for that matter--as that would be impolite; what usually happens is that the person/people responsible, which usually means top execs for something of this magnitude, voluntarily (or sometimes semi-voluntarily, i.e. upon strong suggestion) resign from their job or position as a form of taking responsibility. It's my personal opinion that this concept of "resigning in shame" is a reason why so many problems don't actually get fixed: the person with the most incentive to do something (the person who got blamed for letting it happen) is already gone.
What I've yet to discover, is whether the privitization of Japan Post is a signal that the day of ruling families is over, or whether it's a signal that the government will no longer compete with them.
Actually, it's just a signal that Koizumi finally managed to push his pet project through the system; I doubt it'll have much more meaning than that.
Try forty times, not four.
The TSE also has price limits (+/-10% in one day), but since this was an IPO, the last traded price DIDN'T EXIST YET.
Label buttons with what's going to happen when you press them, not "Yes" and "No" in response to a question people are going to ignore anyway. In other words, not this:
Do you not really want to stop quitting? [Yes] [No]
But this:
Do you not really want to stop quitting? [Quit] [Don't Quit]
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
'' THis is always there - you'd think $250 Million would buy a company a good set of electronic surveilance systems to identify outliers which just seem odd ('why is our guy selling this 610,000 yuan stock at 1yuan?!' says the comp in a split second). But there will *always* be human error. ''
It seems that Japan is much more vulnerable to this. A US broker making exactly the same mistake would have sold 5000 shares for 1 dollar instead of 1 share for 5000 dollar - much cheaper mistake at $25 million only. In reality, in most US trades the number of shares is higher than the share price, so the risk is even lower.
Yes true - in the US /Canada we're abnormal because our shares are in the $0 - $100 range mostly. When they rise too high the companies split them. Elsewhere in the world they let shares reach astronomical prices - tens of thousands of $.
But you should try buying 5000 shares of Berkshire Hathoway.
The Japanese market system is much less nimble - the trade orders cannot be corrected once placed.
One has to remember though that the stock market is a zero sum game - someone (multiple buyers at 1Yuan) just *MADE* $250M on that very same trade as this bank lost that amount. The article seems to indicate there was a large buy placed at a total market value of $2.7B buying most of the $3.5B for sale.... some trader somewhere who was first to catch the mistake and probably had a couple coffees (or less sake the night before) made a bundle for his firm.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Tokyo Stock Exchange admits that its servers couldn't handle the load, and hence, it was at fault for the panicked trader failing to cancel the order soon after he/she realized the screwup. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4519292.stm
Reread the submission. Quoting the line:
.83 cents."
r om=JPY&to=USD&submit=Convert
"FYI 1 yen is about
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&f