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Old 05-06-2010, 06:01 PM   #11
goof2
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Corporate earnings, factory orders, and home sales are all up........But employment is still going to remain lame for quite some time.
I should hope that home sales have been up. I believe this is in large part because interest rates have remained at historic lows for an extended period of time while at the same time the government has been giving home buyers large sums of money subsidizing their purchases. Considering at least one, if not both, of those incentives are going away I'm not sure the housing market is going to hold up.
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Old 05-06-2010, 06:04 PM   #12
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I still threw a little in anyway
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Old 05-07-2010, 11:40 AM   #13
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Wall Street trading culprit sought; typo could be cause of 1,000-point drop




NEW YORK -- Federal regulators huddled with shaken stock exchange chiefs late Thursday to investigate the events that led to a terrifying Wall Street panic.

A simple typographical error was one possible trigger to an avalanche of selling that sliced almost 1,000 points off the Dow Industrials, almost one-tenth of their value, in less than half an hour. It was the biggest drop ever during a trading day.

The Dow recovered two-thirds of the loss before the closing bell, but that was still the biggest point loss since February of last year. The lightning-fast plummet temporarily knocked normally stable stocks such as Procter & Gamble to a fraction of their former value and sent chills down investors' spines.

"Today ... caused me to fall out of my chair at one point. It felt like we lost control," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago.

One possibility getting a lot of attention late Thursday was that a trader accidentally placed an order to sell $16 billion, instead of $16 million, worth of stock futures.

Whatever started the selloff, a wave of automated selling kicked in. The selling only led to more selling as prices plummeted and traders tried to limit their losses.

"I think the machines just took over. There's not a lot of human interaction," said Charlie Smith, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group. "We've known that automated trading can run away from you, and I think that's what we saw happen today."

No one was taking the blame. The New York Stock Exchange said there was no problem with the Big Board's systems. However, the exchange also said it would cancel some trades on its electronic platform.

Nasdaq issued a statement two hours after the market closed saying it was canceling trades that were executed between 1:40 p.m. and 2 p.m. CDT that it called clearly erroneous. It did not, however, mention a cause of the plunge.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission said in a joint statement late Thursday that they are working with financial regulators and exchanges "to review the unusual trading activity that took place briefly this afternoon."

In Washington, a team of Treasury officials was combing through market tapes. By the evening they still had not got to the bottom of it, but they discovered some aberrations -- market blips -- in trading coming out of Chicago.

Before Thursday's breathtaking plunge, the market was already wobbly because of fears that Greece's debt crisis would undermine the global economic recovery.

Edgy traders watched television coverage of another day of violent protests in the streets of Athens, and the Dow was down 200 when the selloff began.

At 1:20 p.m. CDT, the Dow was at 10,460, a loss of 400 points.

It then tumbled 600 points in seven minutes to its low of the day of 9,869, a drop of 9.2 percent.

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, stone-faced traders huddled around electronic boards and televisions, silently watching and waiting. Traders' screens were flashing numbers non-stop, with losses shown in solid blocks of red numbers.

Down Wall Street, equity salesmen wandered the trading floors, calming their armies of salespeople and trying to figure out what was going on.

Then, the market bounced back, about as abruptly as it fell.

By 2:09 p.m. CDT, the Dow had regained 700 points. It then fluctuated sharply until the close. The trading day ended with the Dow down 347.80, or 3.2 percent, at 10,520.

The Dow has lost 631 points, or 5.7 percent, since Tuesday amid worries about Greece. That is the largest three-day percentage drop since March 2009, when the stock market was nearing its bottom following the financial meltdown.

"There is a recognition that the Greek crisis has morphed into not only a European crisis but is going global," said Mohamed A. El-Erian, the chief executive of Pimco.

At its lowest Thursday, the Dow was down 998.50 points in its largest point drop ever, eclipsing the 780.87 lost during the course of trading on Oct. 15, 2008, during the height of the global financial crisis. The Dow closed that day down 733.08, the biggest closing loss it has ever suffered.

Stock in the consulting firm Accenture fell to 4 cents after closing at $42.17 on Wednesday. It recovered to close at $41.09, down just over $1. Procter & Gamble, generally a stable stock, dropped as much as $23, almost 37 percent, and rallied to close down only $1.41
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Old 05-07-2010, 12:16 PM   #14
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So if you could really make a $16 billion typo without being detected, then what is to stop someone from doing it deliberately and then making a profit off the bottom?
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Old 05-07-2010, 12:21 PM   #15
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So if you could really make a $16 billion typo without being detected, then what is to stop someone from doing it deliberately and then making a profit off the bottom?
I think that was the reason for the canceled trades.
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Old 05-07-2010, 12:24 PM   #16
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So if you could really make a $16 billion typo without being detected, then what is to stop someone from doing it deliberately and then making a profit off the bottom?
This was my first thought as well.
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Old 05-20-2010, 02:11 PM   #17
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Market is taking another dump today. The Dow is down around 300 currently. It is just a guess but I think tomorrow may be worse. Either way I think there is about a 25% chance the Dow ends the week above 10,000.
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Old 05-20-2010, 02:15 PM   #18
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I still threw a little in anyway
How's that working out so far?
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Old 05-20-2010, 02:41 PM   #19
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How's that working out so far?
What, the minor little 2-3% drop since we last discussed this? Not a big deal to me. My retirement fund's allocation of stocks is still below what is recommended for my target retirement date. I'm just moving a little back into stocks here and there as the market goes down. Might move a little more today.
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Old 05-20-2010, 02:58 PM   #20
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What, the minor little 2-3% drop since we last discussed this? Not a big deal to me. My retirement fund's allocation of stocks is still below what is recommended for my target retirement date. I'm just moving a little back into stocks here and there as the market goes down. Might move a little more today.
It's actually 6.2% as of right now.
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