THE turmoil created by last week’s botched trade by Mizuho Securities shows no sign of abating as the main players limber up for the inevitable blame game.

Mizuho has remained tight-lipped about the identity of the trader whose “fat-finger” moment created the problem. However, there are rumours that the trader was a 24-year-old woman who was relatively new to the dealing floor.

There is a high probability that the trader, on entering the erroneous trade, ignored an error message flashing on the computer screen. Traders who use the same computer system were quick to defend any such action, however. They said that on an average day similar messages “pop up about a half dozen times and are ignored”.

The incident has revealed serious defects in the process for rectifying such errors. Mizuho made three or four attempts to cancel the order only five minutes after it was made. None of these attempts worked. Mizuho then tried to buy back the shares.

Before the weekend the Tokyo Stock Exchange was adamant that there had been no computer error. It said that Mizuho could have entered a different value for the shares to cancel the order.

Yesterday, however, Tomio Amano, managing director of the exchange, admitted that the bourse’s system could have been at fault. Mizuho could have cancelled the order “if the computer system had no defects”, Mr Amano said.

Those comments could shift the blame to yet a third party. Fujitsu, the electronics group, built the system, which had already crashed after its upgrade on November 1. Investigations have failed to clarify whether the system had been tested on cancelling bungled orders.

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