Bailout

Volume-based stock chart of the day, flash crash edition

By Felix Salmon

Here’s the volume-based stock chart you’ve all been waiting for: the one for May 6, the day of the flash crash. Since the big spike in volume was concentrated at the end of the day, in the final hour of trading, the time-based chart squeezes a huge amount of activity into a relatively small horizontal space. The volume-based chart gives the crash a bit more space.

On the other hand, it’s worth nothing that most of the day’s trading still took place before the crash happened.

On thing that strikes me about this chart is not the crash itself but rather the run-up to it: the initial drop from about 1,160 on the S&P down to about 1,120. On the time-based chart, the decline starts slowly and then rapidly speeds up; on the volume-based chart, however, it’s much steadier. And in fact we saw roughly as much volume in the normally-quiet hours between about noon and 2:40 as we did during the craziness of the crash itself and its aftermath. I’m not going to hazard a guess as to what this means, but I do think it shows that May 6 was a pretty unusual day in the markets even before the flash crash happened.

Many thanks to Omer Uzun at Proteus Financial for putting this together: it’s only one tiny piece in the puzzle, but surely every little bit helps.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on September 24, 2010 (boomark / email).