2010-05-09 01:06:02frank
美國政府正在調紐約股市大跌千點的原因
週四，五月六日，紐約股市大跌千點，對許多證券交易員，證券業者及從事股票投資的基金經理人而言都是一輩子難得的經驗。埃森哲（Accenture，NYSE：ACN）的股價跌到一美分(5/7收盤價是USD41.09)，如果當時花一千美元買了十萬股，現在已經值USD4,109,000.(台幣一億兩千九百四十多萬)，這與中彩券無異！
不過這只是白日夢！SEC 與 Nasdaq 都決定取消這段期間(20分鐘)的交易了。不過對於周邊的交易，像是指數期貨與選擇權交易則不影響，因此承作這些周邊交易的人還真的可能有人發大財呢！
引發這恐慌性拋售的原因仍在調查之中，市場上傳言是某些投資銀行或是避險基金搞出來的。有沒有可能是像電影"Entrapment"將記就記裡透過電腦系統來偷錢的犯罪？國際電腦駭客或是恐怖份子的傑作？幾個月前，美國網路巨人谷歌Google受到來自中國的黑客攻擊會不會只是暖身活動呢？
自從大量的電腦交易以來，要造成這種恐慌性的交易似乎變得更容易。電腦以百分之一秒的時間進行交易的媒合，但是管理系統的人要好幾分鐘才會發現有任何異常。加上許許多多的投資人，基金經理人...等，在電腦系統上設定了自動交易條件，所以只要有一小部分上市公司的股價有巨幅變動，可能產生一連串連鎖效應。
紐約時報裡克魯格曼(Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize laureate)的專欄(A Money Too Far, dated May 7)說：希臘的債務問題對國際經濟的影響不會像雷曼兄弟倒閉一像嚴重，也沒道理影響美國股市跌一千點。
SEC 與CFTC 正在調查這件事發生的原因，連歐巴馬總統都表示，美國政府正在調查6日紐約股市非正常大跌近千點事件，並將對外公佈真相。對此，我是充滿了好奇！
May 7, 2010
The Trades of a Lifetime in 20 Minutes
By JULIE CRESWELL
Someone on Wall Street just made a killing.
That was the subject of so much chatter among professional investors once the smoke cleared from the sudden panic and recovery on Thursday that briefly knocked some stocks down to a penny or two a share. Who had kept his cool during those terrifying minutes and scooped up some dreamlike bargains?
The answer to that question is as elusive as the causes of the rout itself, because the shock rippled across so many markets in so short a time. Stock exchanges and regulators were still sorting through billions of transactions on Friday.
One thing, however, is certain: By luck, savvy, lightning speed or all three, there was money — gobs of it — to be made from the bargains that came and went in an instant.
On Friday the blogosphere was alight with conspiracy theories suggesting that perhaps the whole thing had been instigated by a big bank or a hedge fund looking to make a quick profit.
As outlandish as that speculation might be, some investment pros surely made a fortune from the trillion-dollar market swing.
“Somebody got Accenture at a penny. They’re ready to announce their retirement,” joked Daniel Seiver, a finance professor at San Diego State University.
For at least some of the winners, however, retirement may have to wait. On Friday, several large United States exchanges said that although their trading platforms functioned properly on Thursday, they were nonetheless canceling many trades made during the market’s Big Bounce.
Those cancellations applied only to company stocks that were affected directly by apparent malfunctions in computer systems that feed trades into the exchanges. Bets made on the periphery of the financial universe will stand.
Investors who owned gold or United States Treasuries, for example, saw big gains as global investors sought havens.
But even those gains were small compared with those won by options traders who had placed bets on an index that rises in value when volatility increases in American equity markets. “The guys who probably made the most money in this were options players,” said Larry Tabb, chief executive of the Tabb Group, a financial services consulting firm.
Another group of likely winners in the eye-blink rout were investors who had placed “limit orders” on certain stocks. These are orders to buy shares at a fixed price that is often well below where the stock is currently trading. As the selling accelerated Thursday in the computer-driven frenzy, those orders were filled at prices that might have once seemed implausible.
“There are a whole other group of folks who play this game,” Mr. Tabb said. “They put low limit orders into the market for this exact purpose — for when the markets go into free fall.”
Hedge funds, high-frequency traders and even individuals with an online trading account who had existing low limit orders in place could have snapped up bargains as the bottom fell out of the markets.
Unfortunately for those investors, the exchanges have rules in place to cancel or rescind any trades that are associated with erroneous or unusual trading activity.
“If there is an order that gets printed and it is so far away from the market that it was clearly wrong, the exchanges have the right to break it and, in fact, they do it fairly often,” Mr. Tabb said. “It just doesn’t happen with this magnitude.”
On Friday, the Nasdaq market said it would cancel all trades that had occurred in the 20-minute period between 2:40 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Thursday that were 60 percent higher or lower than the last trade at 2:40. “This decision,” the exchange noted on its Web site, “cannot be appealed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/business/08cancel.html
May 6, 2010
Surge of Computer Selling After Apparent Glitch Sends Stocks Plunging
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and LOUISE STORY
Visitors on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange watched monitorson Thursday after the Dow Jones index plunged by hundreds of points inminutes.
The glitch that sent markets tumbling Thursday was years in the making, driven by the rise of computers that transformed stock trading more in the last 20 years than in the previous 200.
The old system of floor traders matching buyers and sellers has been replaced by machines that process trades automatically, speeding the flow of buy and sell orders but also sometimes facilitating the kind of unexplained volatility that roiled markets Thursday.
“We have a market that responds in milliseconds, but the humans monitoring respond in minutes, and unfortunately billions of dollars of damage can occur in the meantime,” said James Angel, a professor of finance at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
In recent years, what is known as high-frequency trading — rapid automated buying and selling — has taken off and now accounts for 50 to 75 percent of daily trading volume. At the same time, new electronic exchanges have taken over much of the volume that used to be handled by the New York Stock Exchange.
In fact, more than 60 percent of trading in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange takes place on separate computerized exchanges.
Many questions were left unanswered even hours after the end of the trading day. Who or what was the culprit? Why did markets spin out of control so rapidly? What needs to be done to prevent this from happening again?
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said they were examining the cause of the unusual trading activity.
Mary L. Schapiro, chairwoman of the S.E.C., and Gary Gensler, the head of the C.F.T.C., held conference calls with overseers of the exchanges who were reviewing trading tapes from the day.
One official said they identified “a huge, anomalous, unexplained surge in selling, it looks like in Chicago,” about 2:45 p.m. The source remained unknown, but that jolt apparently set off trading based on computer algorithms, which in turn rippled across indexes and spiraled out of control.
Many firms have computers that are programmed to automatically place buy or sell orders based on a variety of things that happen in the markets. Some of the simplest triggers are set off when a stock drops or rises a certain percent in the trading day, or when an index moves a specific amount.
But these orders can have a cascading effect. For example, if enough programs place sell orders when the overall market is down, say, 4 percent in a single day, those orders could push the market down even more — and set off programs that do not kick in until the market is down 5 percent, which in turn can have the effect of pushing stocks down even more.
Some circuit breakers do exist, a legacy of the reforms made following the 1987 stock market crash, but they only kick in after a huge drop — and only at certain hours. Before 2 p.m., a 10 percent drop in the Dow causes New York Stock Exchange to halt trading for one hour. Between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., the pause shrinks to a half-hour and after 2:30, there is no halt in trading.
If there is a 20 percent drop, trading stops for two hours before 1 p.m. and by one hour between 1 and 2 p.m. After 2 p.m., the market closes.
Glitches in individual stocks have happened before — what was different Thursday was the scale of the problem. In April 2009, shares of Dendreon, a small biotech company, dived by more than 50 percent in less than two minutes, just before a presentation by Dendreon executives, Mr. Angel said.
Trading was halted on the Nasdaq, where Dendreon is listed, but there was no news as it turned out, Mr. Angel said, and when trading resumed the stock returned to its previous levels. “It took a human two minutes to discover something was wrong and halt trading,” he said.
What happened Thursday was different because it moved hundreds of stocks sharply at the same time, many of them blue chips that form the foundation of individual investors portfolios as well as major indexes like the Dow and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
The near-instantaneous swings left brokers dumbfounded. Dermott W. Clancy, who runs a New York Stock Exchange broker, said Thursday was one of the five worst days he has seen in 24 years in the business. When the market dropped across all indexes in a matter of minutes, customers were calling him nonstop.
“They’re calling saying ‘Is there something I’m missing? Is there somebody valuing these securities at this level? Is there some news in the marketplace I’m not aware of?’ ” he said.
The answer — that it all started with an apparent error — infuriated Mr. Clancy. “The market was never down one thousand points,” he said. “Procter & Gamble should never have traded at $39. But a lot of people lost money as if the prices were meant to drop.”
For a short while, traders started to distrust what they were seeing.
“There was no pricing mechanism,” Mr. Clancy said. “There was nothing. No one knew what anything was worth. You didn’t know where to buy a stock or sell a stock.”
Jackie Calmes and Binyamin Appelbaum in Washington contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 8, 2010
A picture caption on Friday with an article about high-speed trading’s possible role in Thursday’s abrupt market sell-off misstated the time it was taken. The picture, which showed visitors to the New York Stock Exchange watching monitors, was taken after the Dow Jones index plunged nearly 1,000 points within minutes — not as the plunge was taking place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/business/economy/07trade.html
陳淑娟/整理
中新社華盛頓5月7日電：美國總統歐巴馬7日表示，美國政府正在調查6日紐約股市非正常大跌近千點事件，並將對外公佈真相。
歐巴馬當天在白宮對媒體發表講話時說，美國政府監管部門正在進行嚴密審查，他們將公佈調查結果，並提出適當的行動建議，以防止此類事件再次發生。他稱6日的事件為“非正常的市場拋售行動”。
美國股市5月6日經歷了歷史上最動盪的一天，紐約股市大跌，其中道鐘斯指數在不到半小時內跌幅達到近1000點，這是該指數有史以來最大的單日跌幅。多家美國媒體報導指出，當日股市暴跌可能與華爾街一家大型銀行一位元工作人員的錯誤交易操作有關。
美國證券管理委員會和美國商品期貨交易委員會此前已聯合發表聲明，表示將調查可能造成股市大跌的“不正常交易”。據知，上述兩大機構希望能查出參與股票買賣的人員是否不小心或蓄意引導交易，使正常交易脫軌，造成股市重挫。同時也會調查在股市暴跌時，防止股市危機如滾雪球般擴大的防禦機制是否在交易所和公司正常運作。
這一事件已經引發了眾多國會共和黨籍議員的不滿，眾議員保羅•坎喬斯基說：我們不能讓一個技術錯誤，擾亂市場並導致恐慌。這是不可接受的。據知，下周坎喬斯基將在眾議院就此次事件組織召開一場聽證會。
http://www.cdnews.com.tw/cdnews_site/docDetail.jsp?coluid=109&docid=101155312
不過這只是白日夢！SEC 與 Nasdaq 都決定取消這段期間(20分鐘)的交易了。不過對於周邊的交易，像是指數期貨與選擇權交易則不影響，因此承作這些周邊交易的人還真的可能有人發大財呢！
引發這恐慌性拋售的原因仍在調查之中，市場上傳言是某些投資銀行或是避險基金搞出來的。有沒有可能是像電影"Entrapment"將記就記裡透過電腦系統來偷錢的犯罪？國際電腦駭客或是恐怖份子的傑作？幾個月前，美國網路巨人谷歌Google受到來自中國的黑客攻擊會不會只是暖身活動呢？
自從大量的電腦交易以來，要造成這種恐慌性的交易似乎變得更容易。電腦以百分之一秒的時間進行交易的媒合，但是管理系統的人要好幾分鐘才會發現有任何異常。加上許許多多的投資人，基金經理人...等，在電腦系統上設定了自動交易條件，所以只要有一小部分上市公司的股價有巨幅變動，可能產生一連串連鎖效應。
紐約時報裡克魯格曼(Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize laureate)的專欄(A Money Too Far, dated May 7)說：希臘的債務問題對國際經濟的影響不會像雷曼兄弟倒閉一像嚴重，也沒道理影響美國股市跌一千點。
SEC 與CFTC 正在調查這件事發生的原因，連歐巴馬總統都表示，美國政府正在調查6日紐約股市非正常大跌近千點事件，並將對外公佈真相。對此，我是充滿了好奇！
May 7, 2010
The Trades of a Lifetime in 20 Minutes
By JULIE CRESWELL
Someone on Wall Street just made a killing.
That was the subject of so much chatter among professional investors once the smoke cleared from the sudden panic and recovery on Thursday that briefly knocked some stocks down to a penny or two a share. Who had kept his cool during those terrifying minutes and scooped up some dreamlike bargains?
The answer to that question is as elusive as the causes of the rout itself, because the shock rippled across so many markets in so short a time. Stock exchanges and regulators were still sorting through billions of transactions on Friday.
One thing, however, is certain: By luck, savvy, lightning speed or all three, there was money — gobs of it — to be made from the bargains that came and went in an instant.
On Friday the blogosphere was alight with conspiracy theories suggesting that perhaps the whole thing had been instigated by a big bank or a hedge fund looking to make a quick profit.
As outlandish as that speculation might be, some investment pros surely made a fortune from the trillion-dollar market swing.
“Somebody got Accenture at a penny. They’re ready to announce their retirement,” joked Daniel Seiver, a finance professor at San Diego State University.
For at least some of the winners, however, retirement may have to wait. On Friday, several large United States exchanges said that although their trading platforms functioned properly on Thursday, they were nonetheless canceling many trades made during the market’s Big Bounce.
Those cancellations applied only to company stocks that were affected directly by apparent malfunctions in computer systems that feed trades into the exchanges. Bets made on the periphery of the financial universe will stand.
Investors who owned gold or United States Treasuries, for example, saw big gains as global investors sought havens.
But even those gains were small compared with those won by options traders who had placed bets on an index that rises in value when volatility increases in American equity markets. “The guys who probably made the most money in this were options players,” said Larry Tabb, chief executive of the Tabb Group, a financial services consulting firm.
Another group of likely winners in the eye-blink rout were investors who had placed “limit orders” on certain stocks. These are orders to buy shares at a fixed price that is often well below where the stock is currently trading. As the selling accelerated Thursday in the computer-driven frenzy, those orders were filled at prices that might have once seemed implausible.
“There are a whole other group of folks who play this game,” Mr. Tabb said. “They put low limit orders into the market for this exact purpose — for when the markets go into free fall.”
Hedge funds, high-frequency traders and even individuals with an online trading account who had existing low limit orders in place could have snapped up bargains as the bottom fell out of the markets.
Unfortunately for those investors, the exchanges have rules in place to cancel or rescind any trades that are associated with erroneous or unusual trading activity.
“If there is an order that gets printed and it is so far away from the market that it was clearly wrong, the exchanges have the right to break it and, in fact, they do it fairly often,” Mr. Tabb said. “It just doesn’t happen with this magnitude.”
On Friday, the Nasdaq market said it would cancel all trades that had occurred in the 20-minute period between 2:40 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Thursday that were 60 percent higher or lower than the last trade at 2:40. “This decision,” the exchange noted on its Web site, “cannot be appealed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/business/08cancel.html
May 6, 2010
Surge of Computer Selling After Apparent Glitch Sends Stocks Plunging
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and LOUISE STORY
Visitors on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange watched monitorson Thursday after the Dow Jones index plunged by hundreds of points inminutes.
The glitch that sent markets tumbling Thursday was years in the making, driven by the rise of computers that transformed stock trading more in the last 20 years than in the previous 200.
The old system of floor traders matching buyers and sellers has been replaced by machines that process trades automatically, speeding the flow of buy and sell orders but also sometimes facilitating the kind of unexplained volatility that roiled markets Thursday.
“We have a market that responds in milliseconds, but the humans monitoring respond in minutes, and unfortunately billions of dollars of damage can occur in the meantime,” said James Angel, a professor of finance at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.
In recent years, what is known as high-frequency trading — rapid automated buying and selling — has taken off and now accounts for 50 to 75 percent of daily trading volume. At the same time, new electronic exchanges have taken over much of the volume that used to be handled by the New York Stock Exchange.
In fact, more than 60 percent of trading in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange takes place on separate computerized exchanges.
Many questions were left unanswered even hours after the end of the trading day. Who or what was the culprit? Why did markets spin out of control so rapidly? What needs to be done to prevent this from happening again?
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said they were examining the cause of the unusual trading activity.
Mary L. Schapiro, chairwoman of the S.E.C., and Gary Gensler, the head of the C.F.T.C., held conference calls with overseers of the exchanges who were reviewing trading tapes from the day.
One official said they identified “a huge, anomalous, unexplained surge in selling, it looks like in Chicago,” about 2:45 p.m. The source remained unknown, but that jolt apparently set off trading based on computer algorithms, which in turn rippled across indexes and spiraled out of control.
Many firms have computers that are programmed to automatically place buy or sell orders based on a variety of things that happen in the markets. Some of the simplest triggers are set off when a stock drops or rises a certain percent in the trading day, or when an index moves a specific amount.
But these orders can have a cascading effect. For example, if enough programs place sell orders when the overall market is down, say, 4 percent in a single day, those orders could push the market down even more — and set off programs that do not kick in until the market is down 5 percent, which in turn can have the effect of pushing stocks down even more.
Some circuit breakers do exist, a legacy of the reforms made following the 1987 stock market crash, but they only kick in after a huge drop — and only at certain hours. Before 2 p.m., a 10 percent drop in the Dow causes New York Stock Exchange to halt trading for one hour. Between 2 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., the pause shrinks to a half-hour and after 2:30, there is no halt in trading.
If there is a 20 percent drop, trading stops for two hours before 1 p.m. and by one hour between 1 and 2 p.m. After 2 p.m., the market closes.
Glitches in individual stocks have happened before — what was different Thursday was the scale of the problem. In April 2009, shares of Dendreon, a small biotech company, dived by more than 50 percent in less than two minutes, just before a presentation by Dendreon executives, Mr. Angel said.
Trading was halted on the Nasdaq, where Dendreon is listed, but there was no news as it turned out, Mr. Angel said, and when trading resumed the stock returned to its previous levels. “It took a human two minutes to discover something was wrong and halt trading,” he said.
What happened Thursday was different because it moved hundreds of stocks sharply at the same time, many of them blue chips that form the foundation of individual investors portfolios as well as major indexes like the Dow and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
The near-instantaneous swings left brokers dumbfounded. Dermott W. Clancy, who runs a New York Stock Exchange broker, said Thursday was one of the five worst days he has seen in 24 years in the business. When the market dropped across all indexes in a matter of minutes, customers were calling him nonstop.
“They’re calling saying ‘Is there something I’m missing? Is there somebody valuing these securities at this level? Is there some news in the marketplace I’m not aware of?’ ” he said.
The answer — that it all started with an apparent error — infuriated Mr. Clancy. “The market was never down one thousand points,” he said. “Procter & Gamble should never have traded at $39. But a lot of people lost money as if the prices were meant to drop.”
For a short while, traders started to distrust what they were seeing.
“There was no pricing mechanism,” Mr. Clancy said. “There was nothing. No one knew what anything was worth. You didn’t know where to buy a stock or sell a stock.”
Jackie Calmes and Binyamin Appelbaum in Washington contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 8, 2010
A picture caption on Friday with an article about high-speed trading’s possible role in Thursday’s abrupt market sell-off misstated the time it was taken. The picture, which showed visitors to the New York Stock Exchange watching monitors, was taken after the Dow Jones index plunged nearly 1,000 points within minutes — not as the plunge was taking place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/business/economy/07trade.html
國際/歐巴馬：正調查紐約股市大跌千點事件 將公佈真相
http://www.cdnews.com.tw 2010-05-08 11:09:31
中新社華盛頓5月7日電：美國總統歐巴馬7日表示，美國政府正在調查6日紐約股市非正常大跌近千點事件，並將對外公佈真相。
歐巴馬當天在白宮對媒體發表講話時說，美國政府監管部門正在進行嚴密審查，他們將公佈調查結果，並提出適當的行動建議，以防止此類事件再次發生。他稱6日的事件為“非正常的市場拋售行動”。
美國股市5月6日經歷了歷史上最動盪的一天，紐約股市大跌，其中道鐘斯指數在不到半小時內跌幅達到近1000點，這是該指數有史以來最大的單日跌幅。多家美國媒體報導指出，當日股市暴跌可能與華爾街一家大型銀行一位元工作人員的錯誤交易操作有關。
美國證券管理委員會和美國商品期貨交易委員會此前已聯合發表聲明，表示將調查可能造成股市大跌的“不正常交易”。據知，上述兩大機構希望能查出參與股票買賣的人員是否不小心或蓄意引導交易，使正常交易脫軌，造成股市重挫。同時也會調查在股市暴跌時，防止股市危機如滾雪球般擴大的防禦機制是否在交易所和公司正常運作。
這一事件已經引發了眾多國會共和黨籍議員的不滿，眾議員保羅•坎喬斯基說：我們不能讓一個技術錯誤，擾亂市場並導致恐慌。這是不可接受的。據知，下周坎喬斯基將在眾議院就此次事件組織召開一場聽證會。
http://www.cdnews.com.tw/cdnews_site/docDetail.jsp?coluid=109&docid=101155312