the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring those losses—all apparently due to a trader error.posted by boo_radley at 3:48 PM on May 6, 2010 [3 favorites]
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According to multiple sources, a trader entered a "b" for billion instead of an "m" for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble
Nothing... and like it: The thing is, if it was selling for a penny, that means someone was buying for a penny, so some lucky fast-fingered dickhead just made like a 400,000% profit in those two minutes. Probably some hedge-fund fucko in Greenwich.That's an interesting point, although Cramer echoes what I was thinking, which was the selling price is based on recent activity, so there may not have been much activity at all to temporarily register as a 1 cent stock. But surely *some* sales were made though at 1 cent, and some buys, so... who were those lucky people/machines? Does that mean some person/group/institution just lost a bundle selling their Accenture stock, directly into the pockets of those who bought it?
Exelon Corp. is one of the largest, most powerful utilities in the world, typically worth some $30 billion. For a brief moment Thursday, the stock market said it was worthless.(via)
Exelon was just one of a number of stocks that produced bizarre, and presumably garbled, market quotes during the “Flash Crash” of the afternoon.
Another was Boston Beer Company, producer of Samuel Adams. During that period, the company hit zero after opening at $59.44. It closed at $55.82.
Boston Beer and Exelon were hardly alone. Here’s a look at a few other companies that endured some of the most extreme swings in Wall Street history.
Accenture:
The consultancy opened at $41.94, hit zero at around 2:50 and then closed at $41.09.
Exelon:
The utility opened at $43.35, hit zero and then closed at $41.86.
CenterPoint Energy:
The utility opened at $14.39, hit zero and then closed at $13.88
TransMontaigne Partners:
The transportation company opened at $27.46, hit zero and then closed at $27.50.
Impax Laboratories:
Thespecialty pharmaceutical company opened at $18.48, hit zero and then closed at $17.78.
Sothey’s:
While the other companies on this list hit zero briefly, Sotheby’s went in the other direction. After opening at $34.61, its shares briefly touched $100,000 before closing at $33.
The New York Stock Exchange said on Thursday it would cancel all trades on its all-electronic trading platform NYSE Arca that were executed between 14:40 and 15:00 ET and that were more than 60 pct away from their last print at 14:40.I think it's fascinating how the stock market has do-overs.
Subject: XRT Trade Bustposted by floam at 5:24 PM on May 6, 2010 [7 favorites]
Please know that a trade for XRT has been cancelled in your account due to erroneous pricing for symbol XRT. The execution details are as follows:
…
A total of 19 trades of 100 shares each were executed at 1 cent in seven seconds from 2:47 p.m. to 2:48 p.m. in New York, a minute after the Dow average plunged by the most since the market crash of 1987, the data showed.Another interesting stock movement today was Exxon Mobil, the world's largest stock by market value. Over 4.7 billion shares went from 66 dollars to 58 dollars, wiping out over 37 billion USD. That's insane. That's like the GDP of Guatemala in under two hours. (It recovered to $63.89).
Eighteen of the trades were executed on the CBOE Stock Exchange and were canceled. The first trade that sent Accenture to a penny was executed on the Nasdaq Stock Market. That transaction has yet to be canceled, the data showed.
Source: Businessweek
Honestly, if returns are so low on such miniscule scale of investing where a less than one percent tax per transaction will wipe you out, why even bother doing it in the first place? You should be doing online gambling, poker or horse betting instead, if it's legal in your area.Well, the difference with poker is that an average player, commissions notwithstanding, will make money if the market overall moves up, which it generally does. In other words, it's a way to gamble with positive expectations. The problem these days is that the market is not moving up.
It works exactly like a casino would if the casino were the size of the stock market and had an ever-increasing clientele. More specifically, it's like the poker tables. You pay your bit to the house for the privilege of playing and you get to take everybody else's money (or lose your own).It's like poker tables that had a negative rake. Remember, the underlying corporations do make some money, which goes back into the system, either by stock buybacks or dividends.
Buying stock isn't making a loan - the company that issues the stock already got most of their money out of it in the IPO.Companies don't just do an IPO and that's it. After the first IPO they'll do follow on offerings when they need cash. For a publicly traded company, the market works like a bank they can get cheap loans from, and when they have too much cash they do buybacks, which raises the price of the shares, which benefits their shareholders.
This would make a lot of sense if the market was shooting up and down 30% every day, but it doesn't. I mean, pull up Google Finance or something — we're usually talking a couple percent in some direction.Sure, but there are companies out there with more volatile stocks. And doubled up ETFs like FXP or QLD
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posted by Afroblanco at 3:37 PM on May 6, 2010 [9 favorites]