The spike in the Chinese markets on August 16 was a doozy, Everbright Securities the culprit:
Within two seconds at 11:05 a.m., its trading system generated 26,082 buy orders, sweeping clean all stocks for sale on the main board and pushing up the Shanghai Composite Index by 5.62 percent from its closing level the previous day
- It had protective algos in place, but they failed
- “new orders were still being generated and there was no way to stop them,”
- “The traders had to pull out the Internet cable and also the power cord” to shut down the computers
