Okay, I suddenly feel better about any trading mistakes I might have ever done. How about this one? The Motley Fool Take on Thursday, October 3, 2002 Goldman Sacks Investors Perhaps, right after the Series 7 license, Bear Stearns should add Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to its list of requirements for clerks and brokers. Making an unfortunate "typo," a clerk entered an order to sell nearly $4 billion worth of S&P 500 securities yesterday, when the order should've been $4 million. Um, oops! Unfortunately, NYSE's software program doesn't offer an "Undo" function. All but $622 million of the orders were canceled before execution, according to the exchange, and Bear Stearns will try to cancel the rest today. Memo to clerk: You're clearly tired... oops... fired.
They should fire the guy in charge of the execution software. They could've wiped out the whole firm if things got wild.
Yeah I have a problem with that whole thing because of the number of trader stops that were triggered as a result of that error. Not me, so I am not whining about my own losses. But there is something inherently wrong with taking a loss based on the inadvertent entry of a keystroke or two. LOL - of course it has happened to me....because of me before.
Or maybe it wasn't an error. Maybe somebody wasn't happy about losing their job or with their boss and decided to slip a few digits. I do find it a little hard to believe you could spaz out and accidently add three zeros to your order. Or if it was a mistake, I would have liked to have been in the control room when the operators came to their managers and said, "Boy, I sure am surprised at that 2 billion dollar order you guys just ordered..."
Maybe the clerk was just trying to gain a litle notoriety like the kid from Lynch who rolled on Martha Stewart! He'll probably be on Letterman.
OR maybe it was actually a real seller, perhaps a big foreign seller who just said get me out of this for either political reasons or some other reasons, and Bear Stearns tried to disguise this massive size near the close of trading as a key punch error, rather than send a clear message to the market that big sellers came in a day after a big rally...Maybe, by saying this they were able to work the remainder of that order the next day without having to sell into a rapidly declining market...
Interesting theory. But that would have to be one stupid foreign investor: wait until the mkt hits a 6 year low and then sell your entire U.S. portfolio. Maybe with the war about to happen, it's someone who's worried about his assets getting frozen.