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Stock Market Sell-Off Might Stem From Trader's Fat Finger
s122604 points out a CNBC story according to which "the catalyst for today's extraordinary price swing (at one point the Dow lost almost 9 percent in less than an hour) may have been because a trader entered a 'B' for billions instead of an 'M' for millions on a trade of Procter and Gamble: 'According to multiple sources, a trader entered a "b" for billion instead of an "m" for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble, a component in the Dow. (CNBC's Jim Cramer noted suspicious price movement in P&G stock on air during the height of the market selloff).' Unbelievable there are no safeguards to protect against this."
I suspect that I speak for everyone with their retirement money and/or savings invested in the markets when I say: HO-LY SHIT.
Frankly, I was more comfortable with the concept that the DOW could drop 1000 points in one afternoon due to some obscure overseas debt concerns than I am the idea that the DOW can drop 1000 points in one afternoon because of a fucking typo. I realize that markets and the economy in general are collective illusions to begin with and all that, but do we really need to be reminded quite so forcefully?
Might be time to invest my money in something a little more solid, like canned food and ammunition.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I can relate because one time I typed :q! instead of :w, losing about 5 minutes worth of typing. The typed text had sentimental value worth billions.
It may have been a system problem, that's quite possible. But institutional traders don't type in "b" or "m" next to some number they type in of stock they want.
But even in some strange world where they did, entering in a standard lot quantity that required an "m" (much less a "b") for the stock that is suspected to be the issue at hand (PG), would result in an order that exceeded the 30-day avg vol for PG by a factor of 10.
And that's not even considering that the firm's risk management would, in theory, have caught the issue already.
I am, obviously, doubtful of this explanation.
Might be time to invest my money in something a little more solid, like canned food and ammunition.
Yes, because fat fingers and ammunition go together well...as long as you don't invest in a gun too.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If they were running Vista, they would have to click through "Are you sure you want to do this?" and "Are you really sure you want to do this?" popups, as well as a popup of Clippy asking "It looks like you are trying to trigger a stock market panic. How can I help?" No fat-finger problems there!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Shouldn't this hot topic be debated on /. in, say, a week?
When you can make money hand over fist doing nothing, a very bad thing has happened: work has ceased to become a rewarded function. Instead, it's who you can screw over with dodgy investment strategies and exotic financial instruments that are not only worthless, but a liability. It's time that we end the casino markets and return to investing in things that are actually part of the economy that creates jobs - manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology.
Fund managers who literally do nothing but piss away money are making $1,000 an hour, and the people who educate our children are making less than $20 an hour. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
A NYSE Spokesman disagrees with this: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-bad-procter-gamble-trades-at-nyse-spokesman-2010-05-06
Sturgeon was an optimist.
What's being talked about here isn't the general decline in the market today, but a very suspicious "blip" that occurred in a huge number of stock prices at 2:45 EST, followed by immediate recovery.
Look at the blip:
Adobe
Google
Westlake Chemical
Cabela's Incorporated
Apple
Microsoft
Titanium Metals
Fidelity IIS
This shit is across the board, with very few exceptions. You try explaining how something like that happens apart from some major fuckup somewhere.
On the Dvorak keyboard, B is right next to M. That said, I use Dvorak, and have never personally caused a stock market fiasco. Maybe I should change professions...
Fund managers who literally do nothing but piss away money are making $1,000 an hour, and the people who educate our children are making less than $20 an hour. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
Yes. And further, consider how Wall Street has attracted the best and the brightest of all of our people, math PhD's, engineers, those with an excellent ability to see the broad patterns in society. Our most brilliant citizens are pulled into Wall Street as "quants" or traders or corporate lawyers, and are often paid six and seven figure remuneration per year. And to do what? To game the system in favor of their wealthy masters at the expense of the middle classes. Do they create wealth, or are they merely helping to transfer it from the hands of the many to the hands of the few who can afford their services. Wall Street quants were supposed to make recessions a thing of the past. We all know how that turned out.
Meanwhile fields like science, engineering and medicine lose the most brilliant individuals. Citizens who would formerly have become professors, providing independent analysis of society's problems instead become selfish multimillionaires, who then retire at 40 to a life unproductive leisure. Think of what these brilliant people could have done if their abilities were harnessed in the right fields and with the right motivation. Think of the problems that could have been solved. Think of the knowledge that could have been gained. Think of the lives that could be saved by new medical discoveries. Think of the new technologies that could have been developed for the common good. Wall Street's co-opting of so many of the geniuses in our society will have profound consequences for our civilization. I can only hope that we can undo much of the damage been done by this corruption.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I mean really? What do these traders produce? Nothing. But they earn money, quite big money solely on speculation. What is the purpose of this at all?
Liquidity.
You obviously have no idea what a stock market is. The buyers want to buy, and the sellers want to sell. The trader makes it easier for them. Forget stocks, look at something possibly easier for you to understand: you want to buy a house. You have money. But no one is willing to sell you a house. So what happens? You don't get a house. Conversely, you need to sell your house, but no one wants to buy one. So you have to wait 10 years. Get it?
Traders are middlemen, but they facilitate transactions. When they are right, and correctly estimate the direction of the market, they make a profit (call it a commission). When they're wrong, they make a loss. Traders aren't costing anyone anything - the buyer WANTED to buy and the seller WANTED to sell. No one is being forced.
You say that traders make "quite big money" on speculation. Yes. They also LOSE a lot of money on speculation. Today I lost $9,000. Are you happy now that you have a day job? Even if you work at McDonald's, you earned more than me - today. I'm not bothered, because eventually I will make that money back. However there is RISK involved. If you don't take risk, well, what do you expect? Minimum wage. If you take risk, you can make money. However you can and WILL lose money often.
But please don't go thinking that traders are the cause of all problems - they're not. It's banks that borrow money at 0% from the government and lend it out to you at 15%+ that are the problem. Enslaving people through debt is not something capitalism should be proud of. However corporations need to sell shares to raise the billions they need to make the products/services that benefit you and I. The only place they will get that money is from traders.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What do you think "auditing the Fed" really means? The Fed's books are already open and reviewed by accountants regularly. In this context, "auditing the Fed" means putting the Fed under more control of politicians, which does NOT WORK... just ask Japan. Yes, the politicians would LOVE to get their hands on the money spouts.
I find that when people go off about the Fed, monetazation, etc they generally don't know jack about economics and ultimately start babbling about end of world scenarios, the government, blah, blah blah rather than economic facts.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Wall Street has attracted the best and the brightest of all of our people, math PhD's, ... Our most brilliant citizens are pulled into Wall Street as "quants" ... And to do what? To game the system in favor of their wealthy masters at the expense of the middle classes.
Then the PHBs misunderstand and misapply the PHDs' work, and the whole thing comes crashing down on them.
Case in point: Mortgage-backed securities.
Risk on such things is hard to estimate, because it takes a lot of investigation and skull-sweat to evaluate the risk on each mortgage. Evaluating the risk on a bundle of mortgages was so much work it was not practical.
Then the young math whiz proved that price of mortgages was very strongly correlated with risk, and came up with a formula that, given price, estimated risk very well. (Well, DUH! They're correlated because smart buyers and sellers were researching the mortgages, determining the risk, and basing their trading prices on them.)
THen the PHBs came up with something like bonds backed by a "basket of mortgages" (to "average out the risk of individual defaults). Buy the bonds (to finance the mortgages), get paid dividends from the borrowers' payments. Sell THREE sets of bonds against each "basket" of mortgages, with missed payments coming out of the dividends of the third, then the second, then the first, so investors could get different prices and risk/reward tradeoffs from the same basket. So far so good...
But to sell these bonds they needed a rating. So they talked the rating companies into using the shiny new risk-estimating tool to rate them. Oops! Any controls engineer who understands these bonds and the market will recognize that this substituted a positive feedback loop for the signal from the real world. Higher price -> lower risk estimate -> higher price... (The guy who did the original work said not to use it this way - but nobody listened. And he moved on to other things.)
And now that they could get a rating they could get a rating from reputable companies they could sell a bunch of these bonds. So they could buy up mortgages to make more. So this raised the demand for mortgages, which raised the price. The positive feedback loop was kicked off with a big up-push, the ratings went sky high, the prices of the bonds climbed, and the bubble was on.
With the price skyrocketing more people wanted to buy in. So the demand for mortgages went through the roof. Banks and the like could sell any mortgage they could write, even to "NINJA" borrowers with no income, job, or assets. Who cares if some of the loans in the basket are "subprime"? The price says the aggregate risk is low and it will all average out, right?
So the bubble blew up bigger and bigger, with developers building more houses that were bought by more subprime borrowers with more and more unconventional mortgages - until finally there were enough defaults to actually cause problems.
The last straw was probably because a gas price hike made the commute expensive enough that people commuting between big cities and the "executive homes" tightly clustered in former farmers' fields a two-hour commute away from their job could no longer afford both the gas and the payments.
So enough mortgages defaulted that some of the bonds were doing worse than expected. So the demand for them went down. Oops! The positive feedback loop was still in place and it finally got a signal strong enough to get it out of saturation. Lower demand -> lower price -> higher risk estimate -> lower rating -> lower price. Rinse and repeat. Prices for mortgages drop, interest rates rise, more defaults, more positive feedback.
And thus the subprime mortgage market collapsed.
(Then the government throws a trillion or so of our money into pumping it back up...)
Now stock market guys are used to this sort of thing: It's the old chartist vs. value investor dichotomy. Every so often somebody finds a
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way