Regulators plan to enact new rules to curb the type of market volatility behind the May 6 “flash crash” that caused the Dow to plunge almost 1,000 points in a half hour. The goal is to head off market gyrations that can be exacerbated by automated high-speed trading.
“We continue to believe that the market disruption of May 6 was exacerbated by disparate trading rules and conventions across the exchanges,” SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said in a statement. “As such, I believe it is important that all the exchanges quickly reached consensus on a set of uniform circuit breakers that would be triggered when needed.”
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Wall Street to install ‘circuit breaker’ to head off market gyrations - Computerworld
How is it that the one regulation no one’s thought of is to BAN automatic trading systems? Maybe if there were actual people sitting in front of the stupid exchange watching stocks go up and down, there wouldn’t be a case where the actual people whose money is invested in the exchanges disappears because of a computer glitch. But no, let’s put more computers in charge, to make sure the other computers don’t muck things up too badly.
Source: computerworld.com
