trading fail

No dialing wand?:

J-Com in new 'fat finger' trade case

J-Com, the Japanese re-cruitment company at the centre of a "fat finger" trade in 2005 , has been caught up in another case of market inefficiency after a trader mistakenly bought up a chunk of its shares instead of those of a similarly named but unrelated company. The trader is thought to have mistaken J-Com for Jupiter Telecommunications, a cable television group widely known as JCom and which on Monday was the subject of a tender offer by Sumitomo Corp announced after markets closed.

To make matters worse, the stock price of both Jupiter Telecommunications, Japan's largest cable television operator, and J-Com were at similar levels before the market opened for trading yesterday.

[...]

It is not the first time that the recruitment company has been subjected to ill-fated events in the market. J-Com stock was the focus of a botched trade when it listed in December 2005 when Mizuho Securities, the Japanese brokerage, accidentally tried to sell 610,000 shares in J-Com for Y1 each.

Mizuho had been trying to sell one share for Y610,000. The error was compounded by a glitch in the TSE's computer system that blocked attempts to cancel the trade.