The nation’s third-largest stock yesterday tumbled almost 10 percent in minutes and lost US$3 billion of its market value due to errors made when placing orders, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said.
The apparent “fat finger” episode — in which a trader hits the wrong number on a keyboard — left Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) down 8.23 percent to NT$106 at the close.
A spate of orders culminated in a 15.2 million-share closing auction, a trade valued at more than US$55 million, Bloomberg News said.
The stock’s average daily trading volume since September last year was about 2.9 million shares.
The TAIEX, which was up as much as 0.6 percent earlier in the day, erased all its gains at the close.
Formosa Petrochemical makes up 3.1 percent of the benchmark index.
The exchange said the brokerage responsible must apply to it to correct its error.
There have been a number of “fat finger” errors in financial markets worldwide.
In October 2014, hundreds of billions of US dollars worth of stock orders in some of Japan’s biggest firms had to be canceled, possibly because of a “fat finger” error.
In October 2015, a junior banker at Deutsche Bank AG accidentally transferred US$6 billion to a single hedge fund customer in a “fat finger” trade, according to the Financial Times.
The money was repaid the same day.
“I suspect some investors who bet on a lower index simply wanted to dump the [Formosa Petrochemical] stock to push down the broader market ahead of the settlement of March futures contracts today,” KGI Securities Co (凱基證券) analyst Phil Chu (朱有志) said.
“It could be just for trading purposes and have nothing to do with fundamentals, since other petrochemical heavyweights still moved higher,” Chu said.
In the petrochemical sector, shares in Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑) rose 1.43 percent to close at NT$106.50, and Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp (台灣化學纖維) gained 0.45 percent to close at NT$111.00.
Additional reporting by CNA
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
‘IT HURTS TOO MUCH’: After talks between Blizzard and NetEase over their contract broke down, servers hosting Blizzard’s games in China were shut down Millions of Chinese gamers have lost access to World of Warcraft after a furious dispute between US title owner Activision Blizzard Inc and NetEase Inc (網易), its longtime local partner in the world’s biggest gaming market. Devotees of the popular game took to social media networks to bemoan the loss, with one posting an image of a failed connection message accompanied by crying emojis. “It really hurts my heart,” one wrote. “It hurts, it hurts too much,” another said. Massively popular worldwide, particularly in the 2000s, World of Warcraft — often abbreviated as WoW — is an online multiplayer role-playing game set in
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday accused Alphabet Inc’s Google of abusing its dominance in digital advertising, threatening to dismantle a key business at the heart of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful Internet firms. The US government said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12 percent of Google’s revenues in 2021, but also plays a vital role in the search engine and cloud company’s overall sales. “Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the