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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."
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
>>I wonder which online deal site this was posted on first?
FuckedCompany.com
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.
Congratulations, you may have what it takes to be an editor here.
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!
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?
Well, I can tell you it wouldn't be the company execs who would be bending over...
-Valiss
Wonder who's gonna commit sepuku this time?
Are you sure you wanted
to press the "Ok" button
on the "Are you sure"
dialog box?
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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!
He was holding down the shift key.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
That's very interesting.
Well based on the photo that MSN decided to run with on its article, apparently people at the Tokyo stock exchange have a special, Solitare-based GUI for doing stock trades:
d ium.jpg
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10394551/
This image:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/ap/tok11012090345.hme
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The accidental order was 42 times bigger than the number of issued shares, but a computer warning of the misplaced order was overlooked
Guess that rules out coicidence.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
And I'm pretty sure someone did panic...
Clearly, they must have been logged in as root.
Is this supposed to be some kind of cliffhanger?
I think you mis-spelled, "This one time, in band camp...."
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
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.
http://bash.org/?5300
I'll bet there were some chairs thrown and people screaming at the "Progammers! Programmers! Programmers!" whose software will no doubt be blamed in screw up. Then the executives straightened up their ties and came out for the press conference. I doubt it matters what country you did it in, some mistakes are simply to big to hide. $200 million is lost. Somebody's getting fired. It would be a lot harder to cover this up and make the numbers still add up right, than it would be to pick someone to blame and write off the lost money. The thing I would have expected is for the company to try admitting that a mistake had been made, but that the client was at least partially liable for the cost.
I heard about it on a BBC news brief this morning during my commute. They played a sound bite from some guy apparently affiliated with the bank droning about how this is a known problem and it happens all the time and the banking industry needs to address this flaw in the system or some such drivel. Problems that cost money get fixed. It all comes down to somebody, somewhere, made a big mistake and had better figure out a way to make it look good on their resume, because they're going to be looking for a job.
Previous Work Experience:
Mizuho Bank of Japan
2001-2005 - Senior Accounts Broker
Accomplishments: Served client interests...blah, blah, blah,... with responsibility culminating in the brokering of a $200 million deal for the company.
Man, then I should be able to make a fortune as a day trader!
Nah, you'd probably spend all day screwing around writing code.
PS - I have Digg as one of my home pages on Firefox so I do check/read both sites so please no flames about "You don't know what you're talking about since you obviously don't dig Digg!"
:-)
You don't know what you're talking about since you're obviously both a Slashdot fanboy and a Digg fanboy!
Choose a side, traitor!
And besides that, you have me wondering whether I should answer "OK" or "Cancel" to a question that is asking for a "Yes" or "No" answer.
... they would be like wtf?
Seriously, wtf does "OK" mean in response to the question "Are you sure you want to take this action?" What if you went to the grocery store and the clerk asked if you needed help carrying your bags to your car and you responded "Cancel"