Flash Crash
Video: Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box
December 9, 2012: 5:03 PM ETBehind the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010
The action in Apple on May 6, 2010
FORTUNE -- "The last time I traded, I bought Apple in 2001."
That's what market data analyst Eric Scott Hunsader tells the Dutch TV producers of Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box -- a 2011 exploration of the market breakdown that caused the 2010 Flash Crash -- now available for free on You Tube and, with extras, as a $0.99 iPad app.
Two other experts interviewed -- a fund manager and a quant -- are even less inclined to take their chances in a market dominated by high-frequency trading algorithms, the "black boxes" of the program's title.
"Owning the stock market, historically, from the data I've looked at and studied, has not been a particularly clever idea for a really long time," says the quant.
"I'm not afraid," says the fund manager, "because all my money is in cash."
Apple (AAPL) is one of the stocks featured in the TV program, along with Accenture (ACN) and P&G (PG). Among the extras in the iPad app are infographics that allow you to follow trading in the three stocks during the critical hour tick by tick.
Below: The English-language YouTube version. There are worse ways to spend 48 minutes on a Sunday afternoon.
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Apple trading halted, resumes
A circuit breaker kicked in after high-frequency trades from BATS triggered a flash crash
The hearts of Apple (AAPL) traders stopped briefly at 10:57 a.m. Friday when the company's share price, which had opened the day at $600.49 suddenly plummeted 9.4% to $542.80.
The rapid fall triggered a circuit breaker and trading was halted for five minutes. When it resumed, Apple was down $3 to $597.58.
The source was quickly traced to a MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 23, 2012 11:53 AM ET -
Snapshot of an Apple flash crash
What triggered the sell-off that knocked $10 billion off the company's market cap?
Something happened to Apple's (AAPL) share price Thursday afternoon that has investors still scratching their heads.
The stock, which had been sailing along near its all-time high of $360 a share, started to drop at about 1 p.m. Then, at 1:39, it collapsed, falling from $355 to $349 in the space of four minutes.
In all, $10 billion got MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 10, 2011 2:50 PM ET
