This chart shows the final hour of trading in Google today. It is off-the-charts weird.
Clusterstock has a not even slightly safe for workplace post of quotes from traders who jumped on the bizarre swings in Google stock in the closing minutes only to have all their trades killed. They think one of the big firms screwed up, placing an order for 10 million shares when they meant 10 thousand. But they got the trade killed, something that would never happened to a small trader.
Please note that one of the rants is by a trader who risked $1 million here (yeah, that’s a small trader), and would have had a huge profit, only to have the trades killed probably because someone way more powerful had their blunder forgiven.
Let’s see, they’ve temporarily banned short selling to prop up the financials and now apparently routinely kill trades to protect major players who screwed up. And this is supposed to be a free market with a level playing field?
PS TechCrunch quotes a hedgie who says it was a “data glitch.” Gee, that would be a mighy big glitch, wouldn’t it? Among other things, I’m a database programmer. When someone says a huge error was caused by a glitch, trust me, it is almost always human error instead.
And if it was a data glitch, then something is seriously wrong with the software.