Legal Commentary

Stock Market: Biggest Intra-Day Drop Ever

By Jeralyn

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a whopping 1,000 points at one pointtoday, it's biggest intra-day drop ever. It later rebounded somewhat so that the final drop was 347.80 points.

Algorhithms may be the culprit.

High-speed trading, which uses sophisticated computer algorithms based on specific scenarios to automate transactions at speeds in the millionths of a second, now accounts for about 60 percent of U.S. equity volume.

"The potential for giant high-speed computers to generate false trades and create market chaos reared its head again today," Senator Edward Kaufman said in a statement.

Or, it might have been circuit breakers. Bloomberg has more here.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 06, 2010 (boomark / email).