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just reported sources are telling it that a trading error, a human error, at a major firm, (the trader typed in "b" instead of "m") caused the Dow Jones to fall through the 10,000 floor. A CNBC reporter said that it appears it was a financial derivatives trade. If this turns out to true, there will be a lot of gnashing of teeth over this one
Originally posted by Vitchilo
And so the denies begins : CITIGROUP denies a trading error crashed the market
Well guess what, computer financial algorithms crashed the market. Maybe you started it, maybe you didn't.... but even if you didn't ...
YOU CONTRIBUTED TO IT BECAUSE I'M SURE MOST OF THE ACCOUNTS YOU MANAGE ARE ON THOSE ALGORITHMS.
that the European Central Bank to leave its monetary policy unchanged has scared many investors around the globe. The ECB choice to leave monetary policies unchanged was not surprising, but investors would have liked to see defensive moves to keep the euro from dropping even lower.
The debt crisis in Greece has already pushed the euro to a 14-month low against the dollar. The ongoing worry in Europe is that the euro will drop even closer toward parity with the dollar. Such a drop would perhaps help European exporters, but it would also severely undermine consumer purchasing power and pillage the value of consumer savings.
An Icelandic volcano which caused havoc to European aviation after erupting last month is to emit a large new ash cloud after surging back to life, meteorologists said Thursday.
A plume of ash measuring up to seven kilometers (more than four miles) high had been detected at the Eyjafjoll volcano, said a statement from the Icelandic Met Office and Institute of Earth Science.
"The eruption has changed back to an explosive eruption, lava has stopped flowing and most of the magma gets scattered due to explosions in the crater," said the statement in English.
"The ash plume rises high above the crater (4-7 km) and considerable ash fall can be expected in wind direction. No signs of the eruption ending soon."
The eruption came from a spotless region near the sun's southwestern limb. Extreme ultraviolet images from SOHO pinpoint the blast site: movie. The billion-ton cloud is not heading directly for Earth, although it could deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field on or about May 8th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras this weekend.
RED RAINBOW: Yesterday in Muncie, Indiana, the sun was just about to set when--"Wow! This red rainbow popped up out of nowhere," reports Mike Hutchinson. "It hung there for about 15 minutes--just enough time to grab my camera and snap a rain-splattered picture."
We aren’t in a position to comment on the details of an individual trade today but we believe the trade was an error,” P&G said. The stock recovered to close down 2.3 per cent at $60.75 on the day.
Doug Smith, chief economist for the Americas at Standard Chartered Bank, said: “We’re just in a big risk sell-off at the moment. Anything with risk is a four-letter word. Everything with risk associated with it is getting crushed.”
Joseph Saluzzi, co-manager of the US firm Themis Trading, said: “The markets have been leaking all day but it should not have dumped like that. Everyone walked away — it’s all machine and phantom.”
Other markets also saw some spectacular lurches, with US crude oil futures for June delivery collapsing by just under 4 per cent to $76.70, its lowest level since February. Amid signs of safe-haven buying, gold prices also hit a record high.
While the first half of the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 998.5-point plunge probably reflected normal trading, the selloff snowballed because of orders sent to venues with no investors willing to match them, Leibowitz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
“If you look at the charts you can see fairly clearly where the trades came in,” he said from New York. “It’s that V-shaped drop where it came down and snapped right back up. You had some very high-cap stocks trading down 50 percent or large percentages in a split instant because there really was no liquidity in electronic markets.”
The selloff briefly erased more than $1 trillion in market value as the Dow average tumbled 9.2 percent, its biggest intraday percentage loss since 1987, before paring the drop.