Gulp: How high-speed trade technology could crash Wall Street

Had the “flash crash” of May 6 continued unabated, that sudden 998-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average might have turned into the financial equivalent of BP’s deepwater oil gusher, spreading a plume of wealth-destruction across the globe…

Experts such as Georgetown University’s James Angel warned the Securities and Exchange Commission a few days before of such a possibility and the vast damage it could cause.

But no one believes that the markets’ regulators, including the SEC and the many “self-regulating organizations” that police trading, have the capacity to detect and stop such a catastrophe.

As in the oil-drilling industry, there’s a massive technological mismatch.