A little spice from the financial world. Guess this guy won't be getting a bonus. (There's still no confirmation on who the guilty party is). In Japanese. In barely comprehensible English. To put it into perspective, someone tried to sell 1 share of J-comm at 600,000 yen (about $6,000 USD -- yes, Japanese stocks are very expensive). They got the price and the number of share fields wrong, so instead, they sold 600,000 shares at 1 yen each.
Heh just heard this on the financial news over here in the UK. Feel sorry for the guy, everyone makes mistakes, but he may get his ass sued for criminal incompetence.
It was apparently Mizuho Securities that made the trade. Some new developments. -They tried to cancel the order, but had problems. How the fuck did the Tokyo Stock Exchange accept the order? They shorted 600,000 shares of a stock in which only 15,000 exist. -Apparently they crossed (bought and sold w/ themselves) about 420,000 of the shares, which saved them from about 2.2 billion dollars. -They're reporting today they've lost some 28 billion yen, which is the 260 million dollar range. They've still yet to buy back all the shares though, which they have 4 days to do. I have friends that work at Mizuho -- I'm sure they just lost their bonus.
Something like that happened to a major retailer around here a few years ago. Some guy accidentily ordered several billion dollars in flannel sheets instead of several million. He added a few zeros, no one above him noticed, and the company went out of buisness because it couldn't sell the flannel and pay its debts. I don't remember the name of the company, it had gone out of buisness before I moved here.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA! What a dumbass! That's what you get for having a computer illiterate stock broker. Damn, I'm laughing so hard I'm shitting in my pants! Maybe I should start investing in the Japanese stock market, sounds like they got some killer deals over there! Seriously, anybody that stupid would have sunk that company through sheer incompetence eventually. Guess they didn't list number recongnition as a required skill in the job description.
In all honesty, it happens a lot more than you would think. There were enough people bidding for it to trade at prices much closer to the real value, but still $1500 - $2000 below the price. Rumorh as it Mizuho bought 427,000 shares of the whole deal. The kicker is, if they had actually waited, they probably could've had the whole the cancelled and forgotten had they been patient, bu they lifted the majority of it (2.2 billion). Looks like their losses could hit 1 billion USDover it. The whole kicker is, if it was the US, the exchange wouldn't have allowed it to happen. For starters, it's illegal to short more shares than exist. Since there was only 15,000 shares available, anyone that bought more than 1500 committed a violation (you can't buy more than 10% of a share in X amount of days). So, regulators are now making the rounds in Tokyo slapping people w/ fines. You probably wouldnt' give a shit if you made 10 million in a day though. Mizuho though, are in the deepest shit. Even though it was an error, they committed a few crimes, so on top of the huge loss, they may be suspended from trading for a up to a few months. It's just an ugly scene. The FSA suck though. They come in to audit you, they boss everyone around, smoke in your building and shit. Just general assholes, and you have to put up with it. It would surprise you, but these exchanges use really crappy terminals. The best thing they have is some embedded windows terminal on a 13" monitor and a small keyboard. When I was at Bank of America, our Osaka Stock Exchange terminals were bichrome (yeah -- the green shit from War Games) and slow as balls. You put in a bunch of number codes for just about everything. In electronic trading, something you hear about happening often is mixing up the call and put code. When calls are expensive, puts are cheap, and vice versa. If you put in a large quantity order like this, it can get ugly, and $100k is gone in the blink of an eye.
