Wow. -416.02. This is BY FAR the craziest thing I’ve ever seen at work, especially the massive sell off around 2pm. I remember thinking around lunch time that today’s sell off is probably done and I thought about taking my money and going home. But that 10-15 minutes from 1:55 to 2:10 (central) was INSANE. When all the dust finally settled, it is reported that a computer glitch had cause a recalculation glitch in the DOW that pushed it down over 200 points in less than 15 minutes!!! At the end of the day when I finally walked out of the office, I was greeted by the sun shining brightly. It was only then that I couldn’t recall a time that I got up out of my chair the whole day except once during lunch. Incredible.

In retrospect, I believe that CNBC host Jim Cramer is actually right in saying that the system has failed the investors (although you’re not going to find me complaining about the market today). I really think that the NYSE need to reexamine the hybrid trading system and see if it’s really the trading platform they want to stick with in the long run. Ever since the don of the electronic trading age, the market has always prided itself on transparenecy – the ability to read the tape anywhere in the world. But even with transparency, most of the investor public will not be able to react to the volatility created by the hybrid platform because the platform is asking traders to react as fast as a computer (which is impossible for the majority). The result is that during that panic sell off today, you’ve got no buyers fast enough to step up to take the shares and automated trading programs wanting to dump shares based on market conditions.

As a professional, I have always preferred trading NYSE-listed stocks compared to stocks in the OTC market such as the NASDAQ. But after the hybrid, I found that the volatility attributed by the hybrid is so great that at times I cannot efficiently manage my risk. I think about it this way: The market has always make the underlying assumption that the professional trading community will be willing to step up to take shares, but when you get a market that’s tanking so fast and a system that doesn’t allow for a lot of time for reactions, the only market participants willing to take shares long will be the ones that take it on prices that looks promising to them, you can’t fault someone for not sticking their head out to be chopped off right? So if it is really the NYSE’s goal to compete with the NASDAQ in order execution time, they need to give up their “traditional auction market” pipe dream and go fully electronic.

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