“The flash crash” five years later
By Mitchell Hartman
May 6, 2015, markets the five-year anniversary of the so-called ‘flash crash’ on the New York Stock Exchange. That day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted more than 1,000 points, before regaining much of its ground by the end of the day. The causes of the flash crash are still debated, but certainly included a combination of civil unrest and market volatility sparked by the European debt crisis, plus high-frequency trading.  Karen Petrou, a banking analyst at Federal Financial Analytics in Washington, D.C., believes that since the flash crash in 2010, the problem of market manipulation by participants with sophisticated technology for super-fast online trading has only gotten worse—in U.S. markets and overseas. She cites recent examples in the past year, including flash crashes on the German and Swiss markets and in the U.S. bond market. Petrou attributes much of the problem to under-regulated high-frequency traders.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/flash-crash-five-years-later