3 days of Société Générale

IndexesAs a complement of my previous post about the Stock markets Krach and Société Générale (“Société Générale nearly crashed the world Stock Exchange“), I wanted to provide the exact figures about the very heavy operations forced by the French bank onto the markets (closing the outstanding contracts) during the first 3 days days of last week. These activities furiously pushed the European markets down. When you look at the figures, you understand the impact they had.

Contracts sold by
Société Générale
Total volume of
EuroStoxx 50, DAX,
FTSE 100 futures
Ratio to
total volume
21 Jan 317,600 4,135,100 7.6%
22 Jan 337,000 5,227,000 6.4%
23 Jan 237,100 4,271,600 5.5%

Of course, when a single operator must sell -with no price limit- more than 5% of the total market volume, you can easily imagine that panic spread quite quickly.

Source: International Herald Tribune.

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