
How a lone trader from his bedroom triggered a trillion-dollar market meltdown. "Flash Crash" exposes Wall Street's algorithmic vulnerabilities, soon to be a Dev Patel film. As Bethany McLean asks: "How could one person crash the world's most sophisticated financial system?"
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On May 6, 2010, the impossible happened. In less than five minutes, a trillion dollars evaporated from U.S. stock markets before mysteriously reappearing. Procter & Gamble shares plummeted from $62 to $39 in seconds. Apple stock briefly traded at $100,000 per share. The financial world watched in horror, paralyzed by a phenomenon no one could explain. For five years, the Flash Crash remained Wall Street's greatest mystery-until investigators traced the chaos back to an unlikely source: a socially awkward day trader working from his childhood bedroom in suburban London. Navinder Singh Sarao had never attended business school, never worked for a bank, and never even visited America. Yet somehow, this solitary figure had developed a technique so effective at manipulating markets that it would briefly break the entire global financial system. The S&P 500 dropped 5 percent in four minutes. Individual stocks traded at absurd prices-some at pennies, others at $100,000 per share. After a five-second trading halt, markets mysteriously recovered almost as quickly as they'd fallen, but the damage was done. A trillion dollars had briefly vanished, and no one knew why.