WTF Stories of the Week

[Betty]

Originally Posted by Gn2Dlnd

And impossums are the ones that just can't be.

Impossumable!

[Cadaverous Pallor]

"placental by gum"

[lashbear]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

"placental by gum"

I hear this read in a breathy female voiceover while a short clip of aforesaid placental filmed in heavy vaseline style (AKA Ball-O-Scope) plays on the screen.

[Moonliner]

WTF?

Apple shares dropped 9% today. With something like 20,000,000 shares outstanding that represents a loss of over a billion dollars. A billion dollars.

And why did this happen?

A single trade of 100 shares at a price of $542.80 hit the tape at 10:57 coming from the BATS Exchange. The previous trade seconds earlier was at a price of $598.26.

“It looks like a fat finger mistake,” said Joe Terranova, chief market strategist for Virtus Investment Partners.

A trade of 100 shares cost a billion dollar loss. How the F' could that happen? Stocks are nuts. Sure the stock recovered in fairly short order but still what a mess.

[Alex]

$1 billion dollars was not lost. Unless if I sold you one of my shares for $1 that means Apple is only worth $20 million.

Except for that one trade (and possibly a few automatic trades afterward before the issue was resolved), nobody lost any money.

[Moonliner]

Originally Posted by Alex

$1 billion dollars was not lost. Unless if I sold you one of my shares for $1 that means Apple is only worth $20 million.

Except for that one trade (and possibly a few automatic trades afterward before the issue was resolved), nobody lost any money.

Given today's nanosecond automated trades and how big the drop was, I'd be willing to bet more than "a few" trades were made. Which equates to real money from someones account.

Apple was not hurt, but think of the poor institutional traders.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Maybe this is how the robots will destroy us. Not with laser guns, but with institutionalized drone logic.

Those robo traders have already caused havoc in the past and nothing was done about it. Such a ticking time bomb. Stupid humans.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Except in this case it appears to be human error (someone punched in the wrong number). Would have been better off if a robot were doing it.

[Alex]

And just as with nanosecond trading the circuit breakers can be that fast as well. The initial trade triggered the single stock breaker and trading was suspected for only 5 minutes.

It is being reported that only a couple hundred shares were traded at the depressed prices and NASDAQ has reversed those.

[Ghoulish Delight]

James Cameron tweeted today from the Mariana Trench.