Reply #12: A large sell order could hardly have caused Sotheby's stock to

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

go to $10,000/share. These are behaviors of an inability to match both sides of an order... they are the things that would be expected if a market were throttled down to extreme "thinness"

A gigantic sell-off of Procter and Gamble stock could not do that.

If it's incorrect it is incorrect. I am, of course, relying on public information. This is not my theory. This is the official explanation as of the time the OP was written. It is an attempt to explain the official explanation to folks who don't follow this stuff much, not to posit a personal theory.

(And I was not saying the NYSE ever shut down. Suspending electronic transactions for one or two minutes isn't shutting down.)