The Financial Reform Bus

The SEC threw Goldman Sachs under the Financial Regulation Reform bus a few weeks ago in service of moving “Fin Reg” through the senate. Some trader at Citi or Blackrock’s iShares managed to score the worlds most expensive own goal today and as a side effect toss electronic trading into the Fin Reg milieu as well.

According to CNBC, somebody managed to type a ‘b’ for Billions instead of an ‘m’ for millions on a sell order for Proctor and Gamble. There was also some funny business in Accenture’s share price wich went from forty dollars per share to pennies per share in less than a minute. As the second longest sitting member of the DOW, P&G’s precipitous fall gave the index a nudge when it was already down and sent the trading robots into a sell spiral.

It’s a good thing for the electronic trading industry that nobody is thinking seriously about changing the rules of what is and is not an okay way to trade everything right now. We’ll have to wait until a bill is passed to find out whether the dude who screwed this up is responsible for a “most costly to his industry ever”  mistake or not.