Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The Dow Jones Drops 1000 Points in Minutes

By Johnny M Junior


Wow, what a day on the stock market. The Dow dropped 1,000 points and then made a recovery, but it still closed down 347 points on the day. What caused this to happen? There is talk that it was a computer glitch. Others are saying that somebody erroneously clicked the 1 Billion Button instead of the 1 Million Button from their desktop! How could a $42 stock sell for one cent for a few minutes during the trading day? Was this truly an error or was this stock market manipulation?

Are we going to impose new rules and regulations into the stock market, or will this behavior continue and worsen? How can we continue to invest in the stock market with confidence if at any moment we could possibly lose our life savings simply through a loophole in the online trading system?

At one point today that VIX had risen over 66 percent. Online brokerage platforms were down for nearly a full hour. There was nobody to call. There was nothing we could do. Our life savings were completely out of our hands. Billions of dollars were lost by retail investors due to this technological meltdown. Many investors will be forced to sell their homes.

Institutions make thousands of trades per second over the internet. Is the stock market really so easily manipulated that a single mouse click could cause the Dow to drop another 1,000 points? Something must be done to fix this problem! I think new regulations need to be implemented immediately so that the financial welfare of millions will never again be devastated by a misguided mouse click. I think they would do right by reversing all of today's transactions. The trades should resume based on the final prints of May 5th and only after new regulations have been added to the trading system.

May 6, 2010 is definitely a date for the history books as one of the worse days in stock market history. Regardless of it being a software glitch or if it was some type of manipulation allowed by today's trading technology, this situation must be handled and taken care of if we investors are to continue investing in the stock market with confidence.




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