Amit sent me this MSN moneycentral article today at work as we discussed the huge crap the market took today. So, in case you don't want to link over there, it's possible that the minipanic today (which included the largest intraday market decline since 1987) may have been triggered by a trader at Citigroup fat fingering a sell order. The story goes that he hit "b" instead of "m" when trying to place a $16M sell order on Proctor & Gamble. This caused P&G stock to plummet from $62/share to $37/share in practically no-time. Luckily for P&G, NYSE has some built in technology to watch for something like this, and basically slowed down transactions of P&G for a short time (1-2 minutes) while things were sorted out.
I read this and laughed a lot... Immediately took the article around to coworkers to make fun of the poor SOB who happened to have a really really bad day at work today. In all seriousness though, this may or may not have caused the intraday dip before the end-of-day rebound-- I'm guessing the Greek financial disaster also had something to say about it... But it's incredible to imagine that whatever system the poor Citigroup trader was using doesn't ask you to confirm a 16 BILLION dollar trade request. I'd personally like to think better controls were in place since for at least short time major damage was done to at least one company and perhaps the market on the whole.
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