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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.