According to CNBC, some (poor) trader typed in billions rather than millions.
Limited, because of the company's single-minded focus on its customers: the well-to-do, well-educated, mostly male trader types who lease the Bloomberg company's 157,000 very expensive computer terminals.
News programmes spat theories ranging from Eurozone fears, slack monetary policy and collective memories of 2008, to Cramer's "broken machines" notion or a "fat finger" incident, in which some hapless trader typed "billion" instead of "million" and spooked the herd.
Hourly NAV pricing was first introduced in 1987 and was designed to attract the trader types.
The result is a fairly clear, mess-free stream of rumors and trade information that some obsessed trader types may somehow find useful.
Israel Corporation, one of Israel's largest companies, saw its share price plunge 99.8percentt in a matter of minutes Sunday thanks to a trader typing error, according to the Globes, an Israeli business publication.
For everyone except over-caffeinated professional day-trader type investors, the daily close of the Dow is a snapshot of a fleeting moment, not worthy of concern for any rational long-term investor.
The Weather Channel débuted in 1982, after Frank Batten, Sr., then the C.E.O. of Landmark Communications, a regional newspaper and Auto Trader-type-freebie conglomerate, decided to prove to the world that the weather was a near-perfect advertising medium.
"Mr. Brodsky told me that these investigations that he was referring to in the e-mails on Dec. 3 had to do with whether or not hedge fund investors, which are the very active trader-type investors, were paying very high commissions, maybe inappropriately high commissions, in order to receive shares in I.P.O.
Initial rumours, among them that a trader had typed a sell order for 16 billion shares of Procter & Gamble instead of 16m, have been cast aside.
But Farage, the London metals-trader (City-type, not Del Boy) who gave it all up to become an MEP in 1999, has always been more ambitious than that.
