">My Big World Of Crap

You do need to be careful with what you type. It can be embarassing - eg working for the “pubic service” instead of the “public service”. And it can be expensive, but I doubt any of us have made a typo as expensive as this one a stockbroker made today in Sydney.

It wiped 85 points off the All Ordinaries index, and 82 points off the S&P/ASX200, prompting fears of a market crash.

The broker sold a series of QBE share parcels at between 0.1 cents and 0.2 cents per share at 2.20pm today, effectively taking the entire $20.2 billion market value of the global insurance giant out of the Australian Securities Exchange. QBE was trading at above $22.85 per share at the time.

Of course, many traders took advantage of this, making offers to buy the shares at 0.2 cents each.

The Stock Exchange immediately suspended QBE shares from trading, and some 9 minutes after the error was made, the Exchange cancelled all trades in QBE shares below $22.20.

Many stockbrokers said they recognised the plunge immediately as an error.

“There will be some red faces but the reality is there are human beings who push buttons,”

“These things are accidental.”

said Howard Elton of Intersuisse Stockbroking.

Mr Elton compared the gaffe to a pilot who overshoots a runway and lands a plane in the dirt.

“It doesn’t do his personal reputation anything great,”

he said.

I’m suspecting the guy who made the mistake went hom immediately to change his underwear, and will lie low for a while, hoping the whole thing will blow over quickly. Maybe he’s hoping for a market crash to happen for real to distract attention of market colleagues from his stuffup.

Technorati Tags: QBE Insurance, Australian Stock Exchange, ASX 200, All Ordinaries index

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 8:55 pm and is filed under funny stuff, in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.