610,000 Shares Each for 1 Yen at TSE (or One for 610,000)
It actually happened that a staff member of Mizuho Securities Co. tried to sell 610,000 shares of a recruitment company for one yen.
It had been intended to be an order to sell one share of the recruitment company for 610,000 yen (roughly 5,000 dollars).
The wrong order was sent electronically from a PC in office of the securities company to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). But no safeguard or any error prevention schemes worked well.
What is worse, it was found that the staff of the security company who sent the wrong order ignored a warning on the PC screen, since such a warning was very common in daily transactions.
His or her colleagues found the mistake one minute and a half later, but it was too late. The TSE system received it without desired check, and the wrong order was open and accessible by all the traders including many day traders.
People concerned with the financial industry believe the loss incurred by Mizuho Securities could well exceed 30 billion yen (roughly 250 million dollars), because there have not been in fact such a large number of stocks of the recruitment company in the market. The number of the recruitment company’s outstanding shares was and is still merely 14,500.
That was a simple mistake to input two figures into wrong fields: Stock Volume and Unit Price.
This is very akin to applying a method so called selling forward. But, as the above incident tells, it could be a weapon to disrupt economy of a country. If you could successfully place an order of selling 1,000 trillion shares of a very popular company for one dollar, it could trigger a chain of mega confusion.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange, with its recent aggregate market value of 500 trillion yen or more than four trillion dollars, is one of the three most influential money markets in the world, occupying an intermediate position between the New York Stock Exchange (with 13 trillion dollars) and London's City (with three trillion dollars).
But people concerned with TSE seem no to be alerted enough by incidents in September 2001 and July 2005. It is the very thing that has been truly proven.
All I can say for you is “Don’t trust a system until you thoroughly review its codes and operation practices at site by yourself, or don’t trust it at all.”
As for me, I hate to trust figures so called an amount of money.
“DO IT ALL FOR GOD’S GLORY”