The Interesting Thing Is That the Drop Was Not "Instantaneous"...
Today in journamalism:
Today's Markets - WSJ.com: Global stock markets remained weak on Wednesday, but the selling pressure that swamped Wall Street late yesterday eased.... U.S. stock markets suffered their worst one-day plunge on Tuesday since Sept. 17, 2001, the first day of stock trading after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The broad selloff was encouraged by weakness on the Shanghai market, disappointing economic data, weakness in the subprime lending market and rising uncertainty about Iran and Afghanistan. The Dow industrials -- briefly down as much as 546.20 points after a nearly instantaneous drop of about 200 points -- ended the day down 416.02....
But the Dow Industrials did *not* instantaneously drop 200 points. The ticker ran behind because of volume, and they had to switch over to a backup system, and this created the appearance of a sudden 200-point drop--not the reality of such a drop.
The news is not that the DJIA instantaneously dropped 200 points. The news is that Dow Jones, Inc., has not invested enough in infrastructure to be able to produce a reliable real-time index. Plus it's a really lousy index, as indexes go.
