Earlier today in “Anatomy Of A Flash Crashing Black Swan,” I noted how multi-sigma events (i.e. shit that statistically speaking shouldn’t ever happen) have been occurring with remarkable frequency.
One of the latest in a series of such tail events was the fat finger sterling “mistake” that sent GBPUSD tumbling by more than 6% early last October.
In a market where liquidity is increasingly thin, where algos don’t “think” before they pull the trigger, and where increasing cross-asset correlations mean black swans are likely to come calling more often than we’d probably like, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the history of such anomalies.
Here, courtesy of the BIS, is a table that documents selected “sharp intraday moves in FX markets”:
(BIS)
