Who bought Accenture at $0.01 a share today?

[Newsjock]

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15029723
Stock in the consulting firm Accenture fell to 4 cents after closing at $42.17 on Wednesday. It was priced at about $41 in the last half-hour of trading.

The tables say the intraday low was actually $0.01 and that more than 10 million shares changed hands:
http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=ACN
Previous close 42.17
Today’s open 41.94
Day’s range 0.01 - 42.30
Volume 10,298,041
Average volume (3 months) 3,967,343
Market cap $30.0B
Dividend yield 2.74%

Someone just made hundreds of millions of dollars. Who?

[Ian David]

1. Probably some hacker in China. n/t

[wildbilln864]

2. sure wasn't me but if I'd known. nt

:banghead:

[Statistical]

3. Even worse someone (someones) lost hundreds of millions.

For every seller there is a buyer.

Everytime I am about to make a trade I think of that. Someone else is on the other side of this trade. He/she/it thinks the exact opposite of me. Only one of us is right.

[mikeytherat]

9. My parents taught me early on: "Remember: when you 'make a killing,' someone else dies."

mikey_the_rat

[no limit]

4. How is that even possible?

[ET Awful]

5. I wish I had. . . . crap, I could have paid off all my debt in one fell swoop.

And it would have only cost me like . . . what, $10 or so? :).

[LakeSamish706]

6. Protor and Gamble, same thing happened today. I am thinking that something

got hacked today in one or more of these exchanges.

[Canuckistanian]

7. Aren't stocks automatically delisted if they fall below some price?

I didn't think it was possible to have a $.01 share price.

[Ruby the Liberal]

12. The specialist on the floor can halt trading on his stock,

but this happened in less than a minute. Likely rebounded as fast as it fell.

[Statistical]

14. Delisting is a long process. It doesn't happen in realtime.

Companies is given opportunity to do reverse split, improve balance sheet etc.

Sometimes trading is halted (which is different than delisting) when they catch a technical error.

In this instance it happened reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaallly fast.

[grantcart]

8. I would guess that it was someone who was selling short.

Who was selling when it got so low is the question.

[gratuitous]

10. Well, it sure wasn't supposed to be any of us

Someone bought very low and sold very high, but it wasn't supposed to be any of the "little" people. That kind of action is reserved for only the finest investors. Of course, if anyone had known about it, it wouldn't have happened. That's why it had to happen as it did, unexpectedly.

Here's how we will be able to tell if the market got scammed, according to Bartcop's Rule of Mistakes: Anytime someone makes a "mistake" that puts money in his pocket, you can bet he'll repeat that "mistake." There's hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars that went out of some accounts and into some other accounts. Right now, nobody seems to know exactly what happened. Which is good for the scammers, if it's a scam. But if it was a scam and it goes undetected, will the scammers be able to resist the allure of another quick hit like this? Or will they be happy with their plunder and go away now? Human nature suggests that is unlikely. If it happens again, then this "mistake" was no mistake.

[sharp_stick]

11. There has to be some kind of glitch

How many shares would have to move to bring that stock down to a penny? If it's for real I'll be interested to see how it happened.

[Rex]

13. Impossible, the matrix is perfect. There are no glitches.

[Skidmore]

15. Why we need transparency badly.

My first thought was those hedge fund guys are pulling something.

[Bluebear]

16. Who traded airline stocks just before 9/11?

Another question to which we don't deserve an answer, apparently.