Brief crash in European stocks was caused by a sell order: Nasdaq

Las european stocks fell suddenly on Monday pressured by a brief crash in the Nordic markets, an event that the stock operator Nasdaq said it was traced back to a single sell order.

“The reason for the crash was a selling event by a market agent. We have not identified any disturbances in Nasdaq’s systems,” a Nasdaq spokesman in Stockholm said in an emailed statement shortly before the markets closed.

“Furthermore, after review, Nasdaq has found no reason to cancel trades that were made during this event,” it added.

Previously, brokers had described the event as a “flash crash” attributable to a wrong trade on a slow holiday trading day.

The Stockholm Stock Exchange’s benchmark OMX 30 index was one of the hardest hit, losing 8% at one point after a five-minute drop, before cutting most of it and giving up 1.7%.

Sweden’s financial supervisory authority said earlier that it was investigating the crash and was in contact with US trader Nasdaq, which runs Stockholm and other stock markets in the Nordic region. Nasdaq quickly ruled out a bug in its systems.

Other indices also fell, such as those for Denmark, Norway, Germany, Italy and France, but later recovered.

The movement extended the fall of the pan-European index STOXX 600 by more than two percentage points in the space of about two minutes, although the closure of London markets for a bank holiday reduced volumes.

A gauge of euro zone stock volatility also rallied sharply to its highest since mid-March.

“It was weird in those minutes,” said Martin Munk of Jyske Bank, adding that many concerned customers called asking what was going on.

Munk said shortly after the event that it seemed like a misoperation or technical glitch. “It doesn’t seem like it was triggered by an event in the world, because that news would have reached us by now,” he noted.

Brokerage Nordnet said the sudden move was a “flash crash” that caused a brief panic in the market, while traders in Frankfurt and London said it could have been caused by algorithm-based trading gone haywire or by a large stock trade. “thumb”.