I don’t disagree on the principal or fairness but circuit breakers came about the hard way. Sometimes, markets get so many sell orders due to panic selling that they really can’t clear the trades because there’s not enough buy orders to match up. The first level is only a few minutes to give people time to chill out.
Investing is like gambling in a lot of ways, obviously, but there is no “house” to buy whatever you “bet.” Some other person or institution or whatever has to put in a buy order or your trade won’t go through at all. I think of them more that way. If you sell at $100 and no one buys it, you have something worth $0. If the exchange gets a few minutes (the first stop breakers are pretty short: 7 minutes, then 20 minutes, then a day), there will be buyers.
Basically, not ideal and maybe exchanges should have to be the “house” but circuit breakers are there because of awful lessons learned in previous crashes.
You can’t just pull the plug on gambling. You gotta lose.
I don’t disagree on the principal or fairness but circuit breakers came about the hard way. Sometimes, markets get so many sell orders due to panic selling that they really can’t clear the trades because there’s not enough buy orders to match up. The first level is only a few minutes to give people time to chill out.
Investing is like gambling in a lot of ways, obviously, but there is no “house” to buy whatever you “bet.” Some other person or institution or whatever has to put in a buy order or your trade won’t go through at all. I think of them more that way. If you sell at $100 and no one buys it, you have something worth $0. If the exchange gets a few minutes (the first stop breakers are pretty short: 7 minutes, then 20 minutes, then a day), there will be buyers.
Basically, not ideal and maybe exchanges should have to be the “house” but circuit breakers are there because of awful lessons learned in previous crashes.