| 2010 Flash Crash In one of the most gut-wrenching hours in Wall Street history, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) plunged almost 1,000 points in early afternoon trading on May 6, 2010 - dropping 600 points in only five minutes - before recovering to close down 348.[4] This move represented the biggest one-day point decline on an intraday basis in Dow Jones history. The DJIA The drop became known in the industry as the "Flash Crash" of May 6.
Fears about the spread of the European debt crisis dragged on stocks through the early afternoon. It was believed that high-frequency trading exacerbated the move lower. There was also talk that a trade by Universa, a hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb, author of "Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," led traders on the other side of the transaction — including Barclays Capital, the brokerage arm of British bank Barclays PLC — to do their own selling to offset some of the risk.[5]
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