2010 flash crash
United States trillion-dollar stock market crash that lasted for 36 minutes
The flash crash of May 6, 2010, , also known as the crash of 2:45 or simply the flash crash, was a United States trillion-dollar flash crash (a type of stock market crash) which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes.
A variety of explanations have been forwarded for the crash, including errors in automatic trading systems and deliberate market manipulation.
Overview
Stock indices, such as the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite, collapsed and rebounded very rapidly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had its second biggest intraday point decline (from the opening) up to that point, plunging 998.5 points (about 9%), most within minutes, only to recover a large part of the loss. It was also the second-largest intraday point swing (difference between intraday high and intraday low) up to that point, at 1,010.14 points. The prices of stocks, stock index futures, options and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were volatile, thus trading volume spiked. A CFTC 2014 report described it as one of the most turbulent periods in the history of financial markets.
New regulations put in place following the 2010 flash crash proved to be inadequate to protect investors in the August 24, 2015 flash crash—"when the price of many ETFs appeared to come unhinged from their underlying value"—and ETFs were subsequently put under greater scrutiny by regulators and investors.
On April 21, 2015, nearly five years after the incident, the U.S. Department of Justice laid 22 criminal counts, including fraud and market manipulation, against Navinder Singh Sarao, a British financial trader.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1427217. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2014 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “2010 flash crash” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.