Stock Market's Nosedive Wasn't Set Off By A Trader's Typo, 'Journal' Says - The Two-Way - Breaking News, Analysis Blog : NPR

What caused the big drop?" is dDefinitely the most asked question over the past week.

And the answer? Well "lots of things." So says the Wall Street Journal via NPR.

Stock Market's Nosedive Wasn't Set Off By A Trader's Typo, 'Journal' Says - The Two-Way - Breaking News, Analysis Blog : NPR:

"Knocking down one of the more popular theories about the brief, nearly 1,000-point plunge by the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday (the theory being that some trader typed 'billions' when he or she meant 'millions'), the Journal says that:

'Instead, the picture is one of a highly rare confluence of events, some linked, some unrelated, that exposed weaknesses in the stock market large and small.'

And it all may have been triggered, the newspaper says, by a relatively common order from a firm called Universa Investments LP, which placed a $7.5 million trade for 50,000 options contracts that would pay off big if the market declined in coming months. That spurred other firms to place bets of their own, and a series of financial dominoes started to fall.

I doubt very much this is the last word on this. Stay Tuned.