Nifty Crash 2012

The country's leading stock exchange NSE was halted for a few minutes due to a crash of 1000 points in the S&P CNX Nifty, hitting a low of 4888 intra-day. Many of the Nifty stocks were down anywhere between 15-20%. As per NSE India website the circuit breaker rules (upper circuit and lower circuit) are as follows:

Index-based Market-wide Circuit Breakers:
The index-based market-wide circuit breaker system applies at 3 stages of the index movement, either way viz. at 10%, 15% and 20%.In case of a 20% movement of the index, trading shall be halted for the remainder of the day.

Since the index showed a downward movement of about 20%, the nse was closed and rightly so. But surprisingly, the exchange was re-opened in few minutes, citing reasons of erroneous trades by one of the broker for about 650cr.

From the following table you can check out the lows of index and other nifty stocks below: There were many stocks in the nifty down as much as 15-20% , all were actual trades done during normal market hours and no freak trades which would happen in small-cap or penny stocks.

Such a crash had happened in nifty futures a few months ago, for which the reason attributed was algo trading, but this one was a manual execution of orders. Considering market at these higher levels, big selling could be anticipated, if not such a big one. Traders should be aware of such events and get themselves protected using proper risk management systems. Had the markets been frozen, it would have been a black swan event and if you wonder what's this black swan is all about, you can read about it here at Black Swan Theory.