An extraordinary market day . . .

It is the election here in the UK. Most polls point to a hung parliament. Will that see Gordon Brown hang on to power somehow? This must be a possibility. Linda and I voted in our local village hall and had a nice dinner together before staying up till well after midnight, but still the situation looks very unclear

Far more interesting to me were the wild swings that hit the USA markets this evening. In the space of just a few minutes, the Dow Jones falls 500 points plus and was down nearly 10% on the day, before a huge rally brought it back to just a -350 day. It is initially thought that perhaps a "fat fingered" trader hit the wrong button, - maybe selling billions when he meant to sell millions. Someone managed to but Accenture shares for 1c when they traded above $40 pre and post the mini-crash.

Most importantly, my trading systems worked perfectly, producing ridiculous profits, nearly 500 in crude oil, 400 in the Dow Jones. Given that my profit target is 200 pts per week, this is amazingly good. Still, I am very wary of giving this day much credence. I don't want to include an exceptional day in the stats I'm collecting in case it is an exception. But good to know that I was ok through such upheavals

But will the trades ultimately be scrapped when the dust settles? And what happens to spread bets in these circumstances? What of those people who use stop orders to manage risk - they could easily have been hit at 20% below the previous share price only to find that the shares are back where they started the day - now that would be bad. And what about other, unrelated markets. Crude oil falls dramatically as the events unfold - but why should trades in this be scrapped due to problems in the equity markets?

Inevitably, I suspect that quants will get tohe blame, maybe the effect of algorithmic trading through "dark pools"? For me, this was far more exciting than the election!