$10 million a minute.
That's about how much the trading mishap that set off turmoil on the stock market on Wednesday morning is already costing the trading firm.
Knight Capital Group announced on Thursday that it lost $440 million when it sold all the stocks it accidentally bought Wednesday morning because a computer glitch.
The losses are threatening the stability of the Jersey City based firm. In its statement, Knight Capital said its capital base, the money it uses to conduct its business, had been ‘severely impacted' by the event and that it was ‘actively pursuing its strategic and financing alternatives.'
In pre-market trading on Thursday morning, shares of the firm are already down 60 percent. That's on top of a 32 percent slide on Wednesday.
The problem on Wednesday led the firm's computers to rapidly buy and sell millions of shares in over a hundred stocks immediately after the markets opened on Wednesday. Those trades pushed t he value of many stocks up, and the company's losses appear to have occured when it had to sell the over valued shares back into the market at a lower price.
The company said the problems happened because of new trading software that had been installed. The event was the latest to draw attention to the potentially destabilizing affect of the computerized trading that has increasingly dominated the nation's stock markets.
Until this week, Knight had been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the evolution of the market, helping clients trade in and out of stocks at high speeds.
Still, the company said that none of its customers had been hurt by the errant trades.
