Flash Crash

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Additional changes to prevent another "flash crash" are on the way, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday. Among other things, the commission may tinker with the circuit breakers it set up to automatically halt trading if a stock falls 10% in five minutes.

The May 6 "flash crash" is still somewhat of an enigma, but an advisory panel meeting on Friday to review a report into it could at least help regulators establish some new market rules to prevent similar crashes from occurring in the future, Reuters reports.

Traders will no longer be able to make direct trades without broker supervision. As part of a series of changes after May's "flash crash," the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission decided Wednesday to bar traders from having "naked" access to stock markets.

Recent reports show that several banks have begun advising their wealthiest individual clients to put as much as 10% of their assets into the precious metal. And some are stocking up by the ton.

Federal regulators said Friday an algorithm caused the notorious Flash Crash of May 6 when an automated trading system selling futures contracts on the S&P 500 ($INX) triggered a cascade of selling throughout the broader market.

Whatever the cause of last May's "flash crash," the big question is how another crash can be avoided. According to Keith Saxton, Global Director of Financial Markets at IBM, "What we've learned is that the regulators don't have the same tools as the people playing the market. We have to tool up the regulators and supervisors to see what's actually going on in near real time."

Quote stuffing is just another way high-speed traders make a few cents by exploiting small price differences between the exchange where a trader buys and the one where he sells using huge orders that are immediately canceled. Such a ploy gone awry could be the culprit.