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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."
I wonder how many times the person(s) hit "Yes I am sure" when the system was telling them not to do it...
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.
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.
It's a constant grip of mine. I hate unneccesary confirmation dialogs (the result being I hate alost all of them). I can just about tolerate "This will overwrite a file", or "Save before quit" ones, but I keep running across designers who think insist on using modal dialogs for feedback. "You have just pressed a key. OK/Cancel". I make a point of querying this behaviour any time a designer comes up with it.
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.
Yup. As others have pointed out, this is yet another usability problem. If one simply mistake can cause so much damage, then it should raise a warning flag. Which it did, but apparently the warning flag was utterly useless. Silly "ok/cancel" dialogs are not enough to cause the user to stop and think about what he is doing. If such dialogs were correctly implemented, they would be extremely annoying which would lead to two things: 1) it'd be much more unlikely to make a mistake and 2) as another poster pointed out, almost *all* such dialogs are for something minor (do you really want to quit??) and better safeguarded against in some other way (e.g. "undo"), and thus would [hopefully] quickly disappear if they must be extremely annoying rather than merely annoying.
Raskin's suggestion for a dialog that would work is something like: "You are about to perform dangerous and undoable action X. If you wish to proceed, type 'Yes, perform action X' followed by the [11th] word of this sentance." You'd be asked to type a different word each time so you could not memorize it and learn to confirm the action without thinking. Highly obnoxious, yes. Hopefully designers would learn to only make use of it when absolutely necessary.
P.S. I'd just like to say that Firefox without the SessionSaver extension is painful. Why on earth isn't SessionSaver included by default? "You have 9 tabs open that took you many hours to arrange. Close them all forever: yes/no?". And if something crashes, you don't even get the annoying dialog...
I know that obnoxious "Are you sure?" messages are just a bloody nuisance, but maybe a kind of "smart" version would be good.
In this case, it would spot that you were about to do something *very* odd, and print:
"Are you sure?"
'Y'
"Are you *really* sure?"
'Y'
"Ok, so what are you so sure you want to do?"
'... uhm'
We Americans, though, are FAR more concerned with pointing the finger at someone and punishing them into oblivion.
A lesson I learnt from a former boss: Someone screwed-up bigtime on a project, potentially costing us an important client. They realised their mistake and told the boss. The boss didn't explode, shout, or fire the employee, he just very calmy asked that everyone help to rescue as much as we could from the situation. When I spoke to him later about it, he said that it would have been counter productive to blame someone who new they had made a mistake and probably felt very bad about it. In my book, that's a good people manager.
The difference is that when a US exec screws up at this magnitude, reguardless of how much apologizing happens, they will be canned in the very near future. They also will face a very likely suit in court for defrauding investors. In Japan, it seems businessmen apologize for everything, yet very little gets fixed. I guess I'd understand the culture more if I lived there for long enough, but it seems a bit strange to me.
Don't take this as a defense of American corporate ethos, or a criticism of Japanese ones, though. The two countries simply have different Zeitgeists. For whatever reasons the massive conglomerates that dominate Japan are never upset by newer competition. 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.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Then why are you still here?
You know, all of the people posting on Slashdot about how "Digg is the future" are completely full of shit (not just singling you out Bombadier Beetle). What you seem to fail to realize (or, more likely, do realize and ignore in the hopes of someone responding to your troll [congrats! I'm responding :)]) is that the two sites serve genereally opposite purposes even though they are, technically, both tech-related sites. Slashdot is about having an in-depth conversation with peers and a chance to hear others take on the matter at hand. Digg is about seeing what hits the front page with high diggs and deciding "Do I want to read this story or not?" with, basically, no discussion.
Now please go troll somewhere else - Slashdot has enough of them as it is. I hear that Digg is looking for more so go play in their yard.
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!"
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
So it seems they are using Windows. I think it's quite common to overlook all warnings after working with Windows for some time.