Stats › Intraday and market microstructure › Flash crash 2010
The 2010 flash crash, minute by minute
On 6 May 2010 the US stock market fell roughly 9% and got most of it back inside about twenty minutes. Accenture printed at one cent. Some securities printed at prices as high as $100,000. Then it was over, and by the close the Dow was down 3.2%, which on any other day would have been an unremarkable bad afternoon.
This page is the timeline, to the second where the regulators recorded it to the second. Everything here comes from the two documents the SEC and the CFTC published: the preliminary findings of 18 May 2010 and the joint findings of 30 Sep 2010. Both are public PDFs, both are linked at the bottom, and both say rather less than the retellings do. I put this together because the flash crash is told constantly and the telling has drifted a long way from the source.
There's a second half to it. The 2010 report pinned the trigger on one sell algorithm, and that conclusion has been fought over ever since, in peer reviewed journals and in a criminal court. I've laid out both sides instead of picking one.
On 6 May 2010 the Dow Jones Industrial Average bottomed at 9,872.57, about 995 points and 9.2% below the prior close, and closed at 10,520.32, down 347.68 points or 3.2%. The E-Mini S&P 500 future hit an intraday low of 1056. Afterwards 20,761 trades in 326 securities were cancelled for printing more than 60% away from the price at 14:40, and 7,416 of those went off at five cents or less. Accenture traded at $0.01 for seven seconds. The entire decline and recovery ran from about 14:40 to 15:00 New York time.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 7 named sources, roughly 2200 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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