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Flash Crash Analysis of May 6 Stock Market Plunge

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the what-goes-down-eventually-stays-there dept.

Jamie found an interesting site that has many charts and graphs about the strange May 6 stock market plunge and rebound. There's a lot of information to consume over there, but it does a pretty good job of showing high-frequency trading is getting to be a real problem.

7 of 411 comments (clear)

  1. wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I knew the Flash plugin was unreliable, but I had no idea it was so bad that it was affecting the stock market.

  2. So Jobs was right? by gil.i.hauer · · Score: 5, Funny

    .. about Flash crashing, I mean ...

    1. Re:So Jobs was right? by DriedClexler · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes, we could definitely use more Jobs right now...

      --
      Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
  3. Re:Oops... by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oops... I farted.

    Sell! Sell! Sell!!

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  4. Actual Analysis by improfane · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is the actual analysis:

    May 6
    John (one of the wall street support technicians) was playin flash games on his workstation.
    The stock market is stored under "market2010.swf"
    He forgot to move it into the right folder N:\smarkets\closed\market2010q2.swf usually when this happens it's not so bad because
    Unfortunately, the network admin did a flash game sweep and deleted *.swf as a routine cleanup
    What happened was, the market2010.swf was deleted by the routine scan, so now they having to recreate all the data from memory. Stockmen are now trying to guesstimate how many shares they own.

    When they say fat fingered, they aren't joking. N:\smarket has TONS of files and it takes AGES to load a 1000 files in icon view on Windows 98!

    --
    Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
  5. Re:How is this a problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    If only somewhere there were an article that described the situation, it would really help us become informed about it. Maybe some site that focuses on news for nerds could post a link to it. That would be awesome.

  6. Re:Oops... by elventear · · Score: 2, Funny

    I thought you said smell ...