fat finger??..you don't even use the same hand between the 'm' and the 'b'

they are calling this a mysterious drop in the dow.......i'm calling bullshit

Instead of six zeros the fat ass hit nine.

A touch typist, no.

Of this I am convinced.

what a mess.

Senate is considering legislation that may reel in some of the clowns of Wall Street and the mega-banks; was this a show of force/threat to that effort? Like, 'mess with us and we can fuck you up bad' sort of threat?

It is just slang for when the trader pressed the wrong button on a trade.

It was a trade error and a massive one as in billions and billions of dollars (unless you think Accenture declining 99.99% in 8 minutes is normal only to rebound 102,500% 6 minutes later.

Fat Finger is just an expression for someone fucked up really bad and lost billions of dollars of a brokerage (rumor is Citi) money.

someone working too fast and under too much stress in a fast moving market could press a wrong key that has nothing to do with the PHYSICAL SIZE of the finger.

Fat Finger = a mistake in order execution. I have done it a couple times. Sold short when I wanted to buy long. Oops :(

The only difference is my tiny order didn't have the potential to drive a stock from $41 to $0.04 in a matter of minutes.

Somehow, I doubt it.

...first, do they really use letters to indicate numeric amounts / orders of magnitude? really? Second, if they use numbers, then how in the heck do you type not one, not two, but three extra zeroes by accident?

And then, how is it that only certain stocks had wild swings, from $40 to $0, or from $40 to $100,000? That makes no sense.

Also: do these systems not have any flags on large trades? You would think that a trade big enough to bring the whole system down, might be a trade that ought to require confirmation before it was put through.

So once again we have the financial masters of the universe nearly wreck the economy -- "Oops!".

These brilliant boys and girls don't look so brilliant this morning, at least not to me. In fact they look pretty inept.

000

HTH

...as a $70,000,000 trade. She thought she had hit the decimal point on the number pad, and continued to enter three zeroes after that.

Yeah, it can happen.