Friday, May 7, 2010

Mistakes in Trading

There's apparently a discussion as to whether today's 1,000 point DOW drop was actually a mistake. I remember this thing happening before, although I can't find a citation because all of my searches are being swamped by today's glitch.

I work for a company that provides IT service desk software, and I've worked with technical support staff. I'm pretty sympathetic to the fact that computers are not perfect, or superbeings.

But shouldn't we look into some sort of a fail-safe that would prevent a computer glitch from actually wrecking markets?

... actually, what about a stock market fail-safe that closes the stock market if stocks fall beyond a certain level? Kind of like how the Federal Government can force stock markets close after a big disaster (like 9/11), except to prevent a huge stock market collapse.