Last Thursday’s plunge

I mentioned last week that I was going to take some time over the weekend to read about last Thursday’s temporary 1,000 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  I thought NPR’s Planet Money did the best job of explaining it in layman’s terms.  Here is a link to the podcast.  The explanation starts at 1:40.

They mention in the podcast that consulting firm Accenture (ACN) briefly traded at $.01.  That would have been quite a buy considering it is trading at $41.00 currently.  If you were a lucky Joe who had an order in for 100 shares of ACN expecting to pay around $41.00 and then your confirmation comes back which shows you bought @ $.01 (or $1.00 total) you would have experienced a 1-day 4,000% return!