In Chile they call it davilar

A Taiwan stock trader, according to a Reuters report posted in News.com, “mistakenly bought $251 million worth of shares with a misstroke of her computer keyboard.”

The report said the company is looking at a paper loss of more than $12 million. The report said “the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems and will be fired.”

The act might dislodge davilar (a verb) from the vocabulary of stock trades gone bad – really bad.

In 1994, Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, a former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, was reported to have sent “buy” instructions through his computer when he meant “sell.”

According to this entry in Wikipedia: “He subsequently attempted to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost 0.5 percent of Chile’s gross national product. Davila’s relentless achievement inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb, ” davilar,” meaning “to botch things up royally.”

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One response

  1. Well, things like that happen. I am a witness to that because this is my line of work. Even experts and presidents do make mistakes.

    I am just wondering, isn’t she like our Gloria Arroyo’s misstroke of her cellphone/telephone keypad and “it was a lapse in judgement”.

    Well the company who employed that trader is still lucky, they can fire her anytime, easily while in Gloria’s case, it’s a long story. Actual losses are bigger, effects are long and detrimental and covers millions of Filipinos everywhere.

    Are you sure my e-mail ad will not be published anywhere by someone else? Just asking, wanted to be sure that this blog is not bugged or wire-tapped (as if blogs could be wire-tapped…. hahaha..)

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