Possible Human Error Causes Rapid Market Decline

I was going to post something on Human Error in a later post, but in light of today's alleged incident in the U.S. Markets which caused a nearly 1000 point drop in the Dow I thought I would at least touch on it.

Currently here is what we know about the alleged incident - (Which is still being investigated) A trader at Citi entered a "B" for Billion instead of an "M" for Million. This in turn caused a nearly $10 {CORRECTION it was about $20 give or take a few} stock price dip in PG, and subsequently caused the rest of the market to drop before recovering. 

On the good side, these things can be researched, and fixed. However, in an already skittish and heavily volitile market it can easily cause additional panic by the average investor.

In addition to other issues, it has already been proposed that someone else who knows what they are doing could easily manipulate the market and cause an intentional crash (I believe the commentators were implying a cyber-terror event).

Already the investigations by the SEC have begun and we will have to wait and see what the outcome will be.

Look for a future post coming soon about Human Error and the Impact on Business coming soon.