On: Today the Dow dropped 1000 points in about ten minutes.

[laut]

ACN fell from about $40 to $0.01 and came back. 4000x or 400000%

Buying a few thousand $ worth at a penny wouldn't have been a bad trade.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ACN

EDIT: Such as trade would most likely be cancelled though.

[far33d → laut]

This makes me think that I should just place limit orders for every S+P 500 company at $.10. Chances are the orders will never be filled but if this happens again I'll get rich.

[wr1472 → far33d]

Sounds like Nassim Taleb's Black Swan theory. I wonder if he made any money out of it at his Empirica hedge fund?

[pchristensen → wr1472]

IIRC, he ran out of money before the crash hit. If he had more capital, he would have cleaned up.

[dkimball → pchristensen]

As the old saying goes, "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent"...

[blantonl → far33d]

limit orders typically expire at the end of the day

[inferno0069 → blantonl]

GTC (good 'til canceled) are available to me (nobody special--just a margin account at Zecco) as nothing more than an option to change on a normal order. The only difference is that they stay open across the end of the day. (Supposedly they'll be canceled by something after 30-90 days if I don't cancel them and they don't execute.)

[blantonl → laut]

There was very very little volume at those trade levels - those trades happened on thinly traded electronic exchanges when the NYSE halted most of those stocks for 90 secs, removing liquidity and causing computers to fill market orders.

[eru → laut]

How high has the volume of trade been at that price point? If there was just one share traded at that price, not a lot of wealth has been shifted.

[awa → eru]

Actually IVW was down from 50+ to .10 to back up to 55 in a few mins (longer that other stocks) A lot of shares were traded between .01 and 30, I was able to squeeze in a small order of a few shares (<10) at $40 as I didn't have enough cash in hand.