Was listening to XSquawk at the time. They are saying it was a 10,000 lot vs. a 100 lot in the YM that did it. The pit went nuts! I thought that the speakers on my laptop were going to blow! Great entertainment (if you were sitting on the sidelines).
Either someone can't count, or they hit a double 00 key twice instead of the 0 key and didn't check... They'd have gotten killed on the way back up Natalie
Heard a story a few years back about a new kid working on the institutional desk at a big house. I seem to remember it being during the summer, so he's filling in for the head trader, and hits sell instead of buy on a large order. As expected the market tanks, the firm makes no acknowledgement of the error, and covers making a few mill. They then take the kid into an office, ask him what the hell happened, explained he could be fired for this, and then send him to the firm villa somewhere in the Carribean for two weeks !!! That's what I want to happen when I screw up at work.
Hey Guys, No one sells thousands of index futures for the helluva it, especially on a very "thin" day like today. Most likely, a salestrading clerk on the program trading desk inadvertently thought that a salestrader had just absorbed a load of stock from a Portfolio Manager, and then went to "hedge" the desk's long stock position by selling a bunch of futures... Ooops!