--- type: "Topics" locale: "zh-CN" url: "https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/39263772.md" description: "On May 6, 2010, a "Flash Crash" that shocked the world occurred in the U.S. stock market.Within just a few minutes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted nearly a thousand points, with nearly a trillion dollars in market value evaporating into thin air. Then, miraculously, it recovered in the following dozen minutes or so.The whole world was panicking: Was it a terrorist attack? Was it a cyberattack by a superpower?Five years later, the U.S. Department of Justice caught the mastermind. To the world's astonishment, the trigger for this trillion-dollar tsunami was not some multinational financial conglomerate.It was an ordinary trader named Navinder Singh Sarao. He wasn't even on Wall Street, but sat in a small bedroom at his parents' house in London, wearing pajamas.Sarao saw through a fatal weakness in Wall Street's high-frequency trading AIs.The trading logic of these AI bots was: constantly monitor the order book, and once they detect a massive sell order above, to prevent being caught in a sell-off, the AI would preemptively sell.So, Sarao wrote a simple script on his computer called "spoofing."He placed a massive volume of "sell orders" into the market that he never intended to execute.Wall Street's AIs instantly scanned this enormous "wall of sell orders." Lacking common sense and not knowing it was a bluff, they immediately fell into collective panic, beginning to frantically trample over each other and dump stocks.Just as the AIs' sell orders were about to hit Sarao's "wall," his script, in a thousandth of a second, canceled all the fake sell orders.Then, at the very bottom of the crash, he leisurely bought in at low prices.In this game, Wall Street giants with the world's fastest internet speeds and most advanced algorithms were turned into puppets by a retail trader in a bedroom, repeatedly harvested for tens of millions of dollars.🖊️This story punctures the biggest lie of modern financial markets—the "liquidity illusion."Normally, algorithm market makers fill the order book with buy and sell orders, making the market appear extremely liquid and vibrant.But this liquidity is "false." Because algorithms have no faith, only discipline. Once they encounter extreme situations or are deceived, these machines cancel orders ten thousand times faster than humans.When the sun is shining, the market is crowded with robots holding umbrellas for you; when the storm comes, they vanish without a trace in an instant.In the stock market or cryptocurrency market, those large orders on the order book are often not real support or resistance levels, but a "script" written by market makers (or bots) for retail investors to see.Never decide your trading direction based on the volume of orders on the screen. Because before hitting the "execute" button, all pending orders can be free lies." datetime: "2026-03-14T10:19:20.000Z" locales: - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/39263772.md) - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/39263772.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/39263772.md) author: "[浩浩荡荡](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/profiles/19784218.md)" --- > 支持的语言: [English](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/39263772.md) | [繁體中文](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/39263772.md) # On May 6, 2010, a "Flash Crash" that shock… ### 相关股票 - [Short Dow30 Pro (DOG.US)](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/quote/DOG.US.md) - [Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI.US)](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/quote/.DJI.US.md)