By Cydney Posner

You might be interested in the report by the SEC and CFTC on their investigation into the reasons for the May 6 stock market crash.  Or you could just read this article from The New York Times, which reports that it was a single sale of $4.1 billion of futures by a mutual fund, Waddell & Reed, that set off the plunge.

The sale was engineered using computer sell algorithms. Usually, according to the article, a sale of that size would be executed over five hours, but this sale was executed in 20 minutes because the algorithm was programmed to execute the trade "without regard to price or time." At the bottom, the DJI had dropped nearly 990 points, 9.1 percent below where it had started the day.

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