A recent item in the online edition of London's Daily Mail reported a stock trader in Japan had executed an erroneous trade that sent stock markets across Asia tumbling and led to his brokerage losing some 27 billion yen (about $227 million U.S.).
The trouble came when Mizuho Securities, Japan's second-largest bank, tried to sell 610,000 shares of a recruitment agency, J-Com, at one yen (less than one cent) each. The trader actually meant to sell one share at 610,000 yen (just more than $5,000 U.S.), but the Tokyo Stock Exchange processed the trade, even though the price was clearly wrong.
This happened, according to the Daily Mail, "despite major banks and financial institutions pouring millions of pounds into tightening up their computer systems to prevent trades being made in error." The kind of error being referred to here recently has been dubbed "fat finger syndrome," apparently because it arises out of data input that is mistyped by bumbling human operators.
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