Ce matin je m'étonnais d'une chute brutale et sans fondement de la livre sterling face au Dollar US. Je notais que je trouvais cela incompréhensible. Eh bien, il apparaît qu'il s'agissait d'une erreur à la Rabobank.
Comme quoi, même le marché le plus liquide de la planète n'est pas épargné par les erreurs humaines (ou des robots) !
Cette erreur a certainement eu un effet amplifié (plus de 120 pips en quelques instants dans des conditions de marché parfaitement normales) du fait de la faiblesse des volumes caractéristiques de cette période de juillet...
Voici l'article de Dow Jones Newswires:
"A computer glitch at Dutch bank Rabobank Wednesday caused a sudden and fleeting slump in sterling, traders at other banks said, marking the second such currency-market blip for the week.
The pound tanked by around 1% against the dollar at the outset of European trading hours, causing confusion for a moment before the currency quickly sprang back.
Rabobank declined to comment.
The mishap was the mirror image of a shocking spike in the Swedish krona just 24 hours earlier. That came from an as-yet-unknown source, but traders aren't linking it to Rabobank.
Neither rumble caused any lasting disruption in the markets, though the culprits are likely left with red faces and modest losses.
The events offer a reminder that the usually super-efficient foreign-exchange markets are vulnerable to the same kind of sharp moves that have affected other asset classes such as equities of late.
"These things happen in equities, commodities and elsewhere, and foreign exchange is no different," said Giles Nelson, the London-based deputy chief technology officer at Progress Software Corporation, which produces market-monitoring systems.
"The consensus in the market is that this was a computer-based trading error, but ultimately there would have been a human involved somewhere," he said.
The episodes show that some organizations lack robust computerized checking mechanisms to vet trades before they hit the markets, Nelson added.
The talk on London's trading floors is that Rabobank's electronic trading systems tried to dump up to GBP3 billion of sterling into the market in one hit, rather than splitting up the trade to minimize market impact. It is unclear whether the computer itself failed, or whether it was programmed incorrectly, but the bank stopped the trade within a few minutes, traders elsewhere said.
At around the same time Tuesday, a similar event caused what one trader described as "fun and games" in the Swedish krona, as that currency rocketed against the euro, again without any solid fundamental trigger.
The euro sank by an eye-watering 14% against the krona for a very short period of time on at least one trading system, hitting a low of SEK8.16. Again, the euro immediately sprang back.
One trader said that the order was placed on the Swedish krona accidentally and the Norwegian krone was the intended target. That was "a very painful mistake" he said.
The moves in both the krona and the pound were likely to have been exaggerated by generally quiet summertime trading conditions. During a busier period, they may have been less noticeable or met with stronger flows in the other direction, limiting their impact.
Neither of these events had any significant effect on currencies more broadly, and neither was on the same scale as the so-called May 7 "flash crash" in U.S. equity markets, which sent ripples throughout the financial markets. Indeed, the drop in the pound didn't breach the previous day's low.
Nonetheless, the fear among market insiders is that these events could easily have been more serious, distorting prices more generally, and they can affect any dealing firm in any market.
Last summer, for example, a trader at London brokerage PVM Oil Futures Ltd. ramped up the price of a key oil futures contracts by trading while drunk. His actions attracted the attention of regulators such as the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority, which later fined him.
"These things happen regularly, and we only hear about some of them," said Nelson. "The danger is, as we saw from the case of PVM, they can cause greater regulatory scrutiny of these markets."
-By Katie Martin, Dow Jones Newswires.
See you later !
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