Whenever I have no idea about some event, rather than hypothesize some half-assed theory, I prefer instead to go to the pros who know their area of expertise better
Thus, for the the Knight Trading glitch, I direct your attention to Nanex: Knightmare on Wall Street
On August 1, 2012, starting at market open (9:30 EDT), our monitoring software alarms went off on hundreds of symbols. Looking closer at the data, we found many stocks had extremely high trade rates: several stocks sustained more than 100 trades per second.
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