Charlie Gasparino reports on the trade that caused markets to go haywire yesterday, and which caused market maker Knight Capital to lose $440 million.

 

This is actually very similar to what Doug Kass’ “Gnome” said in a Real Money post yesterday:

High above the Alps, my Gnome is saying that an algo program that was supposed to be executed over a five-day period was mistakenly executed over a five-minute period this morning and caused the unusual price behavior in certain equities.

UPDATE: FT has more on the story. They also cite traders in saying that the trade happened over a few minutes, but suggest that the intended timeframe was more modest — 1 to 5 days — rather than 5 weeks.