CafeChatNoir

During yesterdays fun and games in the market, over the course of approximately 4 minutes, the Dow dropped 200 points. They’re still not 100% sure exactly what happened, but so far it seems to come down to this – the volume overwhelmed some servers and things “broke out” a little before 3PM. The bottom half of the chart is volume – see that nice little spike there? At one point they were thinking someone made a mistake and put too many zeros at the end of an order, but it seems to just been a whole boatload of unexecuted trades just queued up and waiting.

It will be interesting to see what effect (if any) this has on the continued use of the hybrid trading systems that have been introduced in the past year or so.

ETA @ 4PM – Specialists on the floor of the NYSE have been told not to close their stocks just yet.  Curiouser and curiouser…

- it’s the stupid little shit that makes me borderline homocidal.

Case in point: Vendor calls Monday morning and says, “OK, so can we come out today?” Nope, I need a touch more notice than that and offer up Tuesday afternoon. OK, between 12-4PM it is, and they’ll call when en route. So, I make myself available between 12-4, thinking I might even get lucky and they’ll be early and I can get some other errands run afterwards. Of course, no call and 4 hours wasted waiting around for nothing to happen.

This morning? I get a voicemail – “OK, so what time is good for today?” Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. I call back and get vendor’s call center… They have me scheduled for between 2-2:30 PM. Again, I need something slightly more than same-freakin’-day notice, and I pointed out the tech said YESTERDAY between 12-4PM, which of course they had no record of in their system. (Left hand, please let me introduce you to right hand.)

So, we’re trying this again on Friday, between 1-3PM, and again, they will call when en route. At least this time I’ll only lose 3 hours…

And I get to go to the DMV this afternoon. Icing on the cake.