Fat fingered typing costs a trader’s bosses £128m
From Leo Lewis in Tokyo
CLUMSY typing cost a Japanese bank at least £128 million and staff their Christmas bonuses yesterday, after a trader mistakenly sold 600,000 more shares than he should have.
The trader at Mizuho Securities, who has not been named, fell foul of what is known in financial circles as “fat finger syndrome” where a dealer types incorrect details into his computer. He wanted to sell one share in a new telecoms company called J Com, for 600,000 yen (about £3,000).
Unfortunately, the order went through as a sale of 600,000 shares at 1 yen each.
That error alone would have been bad enough, but the consequences were much worse because 600,000 shares represents more than 40 times the total number issued by the company, and the vast discrepancy effectively created a technical shortage of shares, worth about £1.6 billion.
Despite Mizuho’s attempts to rectify the mistake, some estimates put the possible financial damage to the firm at about 60 billion yen — a figure that may be big enough to destabilise the securities arm of what is one of the four largest financial groups in the world.
Makoto Fukuda, the company’s president, said that it expected a loss of 27 billion yen, which could rise above 30 billion but would not endanger its financial health.
The slip caused immediate shockwaves in the Tokyo market as traders tried to guess which firm had made the mistake. Fearing the impact, traders sold shares in all Japanese broking houses and the sell-off led to the value of the Nikkei 225 falling 2 per cent. It was only later that Mizuho admitted that one of its traders had made the error.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 93,00.html
