This isn’t related to web publishing, but it is amusing. An employee at a Japanese bank made a typing error and accidently sold a few too many shares of stock in his company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — $223 million too much.

Apparently this isn’t the first time something like this has happened — “A trader at UBS Warburg, the Swiss investment bank, lost £71 million in seconds while trying to sell 16 shares in Japanese advertising giant Dentsu at 600,000 yen each. He sold 610,000 shares at six yen each”

If you were a trader or a bank how much money would you spend on software to prevent this sort of thing happening? If I was a programmer in the financial industry right now, I’d be thinking of a solution and how I could make money from it. It is pretty scary that a single employee could do this much damage to a company simply on accident.

Makes me glad I’m in an industry where a typing mistake means edit->undo.