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A Citi trader working from home and unable to access their full suite of trading tools was forced to manually build a basket of stocks. That’s when things started to go wrong. The trader intended a $58 million trade but entered 58 million units, creating a $444 billion basket by mistake. Ooops.
The Wall Street giant’s systems immediately fired off hundreds of warnings, ultimately blocking some — but not all — of the trade from going through. Still, about $1.4 billion worth of equities began to be sold across European exchanges. Markets immediately started going haywire. Within minutes, the trader realized the mistake and canceled the order. But the damage was done: The blunder had sparked a five-minute selloff in European stocks, wreaking havoc in bourses stretching from France to Norway.
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